We’re educating our kids all wrong: The progressive argument against standardized-test mania - Salon.com:
We’re educating our kids all wrong: The progressive argument against standardized-test mania
Backlash against overtesting, "accountability" and Common Core is right on. Here's how we empower teachers and kids
TOM LITTLE AND KATHERINE ELLISON
Excerpted from "Loving Learning: How Progressive Education Can Save America's Schools"
Failing grades for the accountability movement
I’ve been delighted to watch a popular backlash building against an educational “accountability” movement that has robbed students of opportunities for meaningful and lasting learning—not to mention a decent lunch hour. In 2013, teachers at six Seattle high schools refused to administer a new standardized test they said was useless. Students in sixteen states boycotted standardized tests based on the new Common Core curriculum.
And the New York State United Teachers’ union demanded a three-year moratorium on high-stakes testing. In the midst of all this, a movement calling itself the Badass Teachers Association (BAT) and claiming 20,000 members announced its support for “every teacher who refuses to be blamed for the failure of our society to erase poverty and inequality, and refuses to accept assessments, tests, and evaluations imposed by those who have contempt for real teaching and learning.” Whipping up the anti-test fervor even more over the past four years have been thousands of screenings, at schools throughout the nation, of the 2009 documentary “Race to Nowhere: The Dark Side of America’s Achievement Culture,” which features stories of hard-driven students with stress-related illnesses—including that of a perfectionist thirteen-year-old girl who committed suicide.
The New York Times has denounced America’s “testing mania.” From the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind law in 2001 through the Obama administration’s 2009 Race to the Top initiative, federal, state, and local officials have demanded that schools demonstrate success with results on standardized tests. But many educators protest that today’s tests are so poorly designed and developmentally inappropriate that they are making students fear and hate going to school.
In late 2013, Carol Burris, an award-winning New York City high school principal, wrote a scathing review of a test for first-graders, focusing on a question that offered four choices to a problem asking, “Which is a related subtraction sentence?”
Burris noted that her nephew’s wife, who teaches calculus, was stumped by the wording. On her blog, she posted a copy of the test, which had been given to her by a distraught mother. The woman’s son, after dutifully answering the first several questions, had collapsed toward the end into writing big awkward “X’s” through the problems, clearly giving up hope of answering them correctly.
Now, we progressive educators have no objections to accountability, per se. Scientists have shown that the occasional test can help students learn. It’s also clear to us that some teachers, schools, and even states truly ought to be held to higher standards.
Yet we’re convinced that our national testing mania is doing more harm than good. We’re also dismayed by increasing evidence that the nationwide increase in standardized tests has done the most harm to minority and low-income students, widening the income equality gap. And we question some of the motives driving the trend.
In recent years, educational testing has become a multibillion-dollar industry, driven by big international corporations such as Pearson and Educational Testing Services. Simultaneously, both the number and frequency of standardized tests have been ratcheting up, as many school districts have been adding their own tests to prepare students for the federally mandated ones.
Today’s college-bound students find themselves undergoing a continuous stream of these high-pressure tests, including not only the mandated exams to track schools’ progress but SSATs (for private school applicants), PSATs, SATs, ACTs, and four-hour-long Advanced Placement tests, on top of the usual bevy of spot quizzes, mid-terms, and finals.
New laws in many states have tied teachers’ salaries and even jobs to students’ scores. As a result, what used to be a thoughtful, creative profession has become more like working in a factory. Educators are told: Here is the text. This is what we want you to teach; this is how long you can spend teaching it; and this is how we’ll judge your performance. For students, the changes are making many of today’s classrooms seem ever more like the harsh, boring schoolrooms of the early twentieth century.
In my more than a hundred hours of conversations with progressive teachers and principals over the past year, I’ve heard a rise in anxiety that many of us now share with our colleagues in conventional schools.
The worries are worst for teachers in progressive public schools, which in most cases must abide by district policy. In early 2014, Chris Collaros, principal of the Wickliffe Elementary School, said new Ohio State laws ranking teachers according to test results were not only making it harder for the school to retain its progressive identity but undermining teachers’ effectiveness.
“I have to put teachers in a box, based on a rubric with ten different elements of teaching,” he said. “That shuts down a lot of good conversation and makes progressive innovating a lot harder to do. It’s a one-size-fits-all model.”
As director of the independent K–6 Children’s Community School in Van Nuys, California, Neal Wrightson is relatively immune from such pressures, but worries that for children in mainstream schools, the value system being taught is “I’m good at this. Too bad for you,” rather than “I’m good at this. Let me help you.”
The test-driven return to rote learning may be hurting our economy as well as our society, by squelching signs of idiosyncratic creativity and leadership, the very qualities we need to keep our GNP growing. Instead, most current assessments track only the most low-level, easily measured thinking.
