An Ideal Future for Education: swing, pendulum, swing!

What would an ideal education look like, according to moi? Everyone always says, “Well, the pendulum is always swinging in education,” and right now it has swung heavily and ponderously, to nuts and bolts, or in other words, to testing.

Just skim through my blogs this year to see why testing is untenable as a measurement of student learning, of teacher excellence, or of school quality, at least high-stakes testing as we’re doing it now. The tests themselves are in question, and of course the idea of a one-time measurement to give any useful information at all about a student’s school year is ridiculous, especially with recent research that points out that we remember only a fraction of what we learn, and that this is put at risk by stress and other factors.

So swing, you pendulum! Swing to the concept of childhood,of growing up healthy, sane and safe!

And what does a healthy, happy childhood look like?

For certain, it would have balance. Look to the arts-based curricula as in Waldorf schools to see what I mean. Students learn academic things, yes, but they also learn to use a saw, gouge and hammer. They learn their math facts of course, but they also learn to grow an excellent garden and to prepare the food they grow. Students learn literature, writing, and science; they learn social studies, yes, but they also learn how to draw and paint and sculpt. They learn how to play instruments. They learn how to dance.

Why bother with all this? The answer is vitally important.

The answer is this:

We are educating students. These are children who grow up in our care. In many cases, they don’t enjoy a variety of experiences at home, because tired parents often park them in front of the television at the end of the day with a bag of Mickie D’s in their laps. These are children who will grow up to be teenagers and then into adults, who need a spectrum of skills and experiences to be whole, useful, and most of all, to be happy.

Just because you can’t test a dance class, not in any meaningful way, doesn’t take away from its immense value in a child’s childhood. If we honestly think back to our own educations, we will see that we remember the marching band, the successful drawing or painting we did, the school play. There’s a reason for that: these are the things that design a more delightful growing up.

My school of the future, my ideal education? It would have to be a place that embraces and nurtures the whole child, a place where kids can grow up to be competent and happy.

Parents DO Have the Power

I just read this great blog about how parents courageously chose to stop standardized testing in their school.

The article points out that schools always cry about limited budgets, but that “our state spends nearly $50 million a year on standardized testing, yet parents hear their schools pleading poverty.”

Along with other schools and districts in the nation, these parents “just say no” to standardized tests. This creates a much more humane school experience for their children, saves money, and makes a statement to parents everywhere:

YOU can do this. You do have the power to make a change in the schools.

Take the Test!

OK, all you staunch standardized-tests supporters! Here’s your Waterloo (name that reference, quick! It’s worth 20 points!).

Let’s see how you do on the tests. Let’s make it really easy for you. You don’t have to take a test for Alegebra 2 (which you would certainly have to pass, being a grownup who graduated high school, right?).

Try 7th grade math. Go here and take the test. Wipe away your tears of frustration and ignorance. Now try 6th grade language arts test here.

Remember, these are tests for younger kids. If you feel all cocky and confident taking these tests, try the high-school standardized tests.

By now you may be mad at me. Right! That’s how your son or daughter feels sitting down to a paper or computer screen with these arbitrary so-called measurements of their learning and capacity for learning.

Now see if you can feel along with the classroom teachers, who face roomfuls of kids newly arrived from Mexico, China, Indonesia. Or a sprinkle of non-readers, or a row of blank-faced kids who have been beaten every other day, or whose dad and now their mom have just been incarcerated.

How about several rows of stoned, entitled rich kids who have never heard the word “no” in their young lives?

It’s easy to draw a hard line, you readers sitting out there. Test ‘em all! High standards for all! Low scores? Blame those greedy, lazy teachers.

But here I sit in my juvenile-corrections facility, facing a roomful of incarcerated youth, all of whom have their stories, tragic or annoying or horrifying. All of them have to take those standardized tests at the end of the year, and most of them won’t do particularly well.

 

Can We Find Middle Ground on Standardized Testing?

Ask teachers or administrators what they think about high-stakes testing. You’ll usually get the same answers:

“We hate it! We worry every year about AYP. Our instruction suffers. We can never tell what scores will be because we have a new group of students every year. These tests are not particularly reliable [or not particularly useful for our particular population]. It doesn’t make sense to evaluate teachers based on students’ once-yearly, high-stakes exams,” and so on. If you are a teacher, no doubt you’ve said all this and much more!

High-level educational administrators seem to love high-stakes standardized testing. They love to compare our national scores with scores from Japan or Sweden (fo0lishly: how can you compare a small country with a relatively homogenous population with wildly variable populations across a huge nation like America?). Politicians love high-stakes testing too. In this way, they feel sure their expensive education budgets are properly spent.

Companies that produce the standardized tests love the national trend for yearly high-stakes tests.
 The reasons for that should be obvious enough…

Seems like there’s an unbridgeable gap between what decision-makers want and what educators want.

Can we find some middle ground?

Maybe it is not as hard as it seems. One good step would be to rely on formative tests rather than last year’s test scores. This way, we could more accurately track and assess student progress as we go through the year, fine-tuning our instruction to actual student progress as we go along. Administrators can keep legislators apprised of student scores throughout the year, rather than just relying on a high-stakes test score once a year.

Now that many states have moved to the Common Core, we have some wonderful built-in assessments which are not just high-stakes standardized tests. The project results can be posted on school websites for local communities and politicians at all levels to examine.

There may be other good ways to find middle ground, but implementing even just these two suggestions could create more reliable assessment to satisfy politicians as well as freeing us to better teach our students.

Measuring the **Magic**

My state, Utah, just passed a law like Florida’s, to give schools grades (A through F), based on several factors, mostly test scores. This is just another bad idea in a national series of bad ideas, basing funding and school status on student test scores. This one’s particularly bad because Florida has in place another law to limit class sizes, which can ensure more personal attention to students, while Utah has the highest class sizes in the nation (a prolific population).

This begs a very important question: what is good teaching?

The avalanche of wrong thinking out there today says that good teaching is demonstrated by good test scores. Of course that’s nonsense. Very bad teachers could produce good test scores. Very good teachers may not produce good test scores, depending on many factors, including the actual students in the classroom. As one writer put it, “Teachers don’t have a say on who comes into their classes.” Students come to us variously prepared and variously skilled. We take everybody in and do the best we can–but the once-yearly high-stakes test cannot possible demonstrate what we do, and whether we do it well or not.

Truth is, for many years, it’s been terribly hard to pinpoint what good teaching actually is. Studies have found that all kinds of teachers turn out to be really good ones, whether they do small-group interventions or lectures. There is one thing they all have in common, but it’s something that will never show up on standardized tests.

I call it MAGIC.

It’s that indescribable combination of passion about a subject and love for people, including the ability to create moments of pure delight and fascination. Some of this comes down to storytelling, some to innate psychology, and some of it, we must admit, to great showmanship. It comes down to pacing, to intuition, to commitment to kids and commitment to excellence.

Like the famous quote on pornography, we can’t always describe it, but we know it when we see it.

I’ve never seen “magic” on a teacher evaluation form, but most principals I’ve known recognize it and value it. I imagine the only way TO value it, in terms of grading schools and evaluating teachers, is to stop emphasizing test scores so much and to visit classrooms, talk to kids, see what’s really going on. Good teachers are at a premium, and so is their magic–and that has little to do with standardized tests.

The Emotional Toll (on teachers) of NCLB

At the end of school last year, all my teacher friends, near and far, looked as though they had stuck their fingers in electric sockets and fried their circuits. Most of them agreed that standardized testing had taken all their joie de vivre and their emotional reserve.

During the summer, we’ve run into teachers in our travels and all of them show this same hollow-eyed exhaustion when they talk about school. Many of them go further and say that the pressures of NCLB have ruined their teaching experience, and some of them have left the profession because of it.

Why is this so? It must be because administrators feel such (justified) pressure to achieve AYP  with ever-improving test scores that they focus much of their energy on urging teachers to get their kids to pass the tests.

Whoa, wait a minute! The whole thing comes down on teachers! That’s what’s wrong with NCLB; teachers take the brunt of the pressure for kids’ performance. Of course, the results bear down on administrators too, because if kids don’t pass the tests, and the pattern continues, schools can and do close.

Education is so much more than math, reading and science. Math, reading and science are so much more than standardized test results.

Hey! we are teaching children! There are endless delightful nuances and pathways to a good education. The last thing we need is “fried teachers,” their compassionate souls wrung dry with the crush of standardized test pressures.

That Pesky No-Child-Left-Behind Terminology

Let’s face it: districts and schools are living (and dying) by these terms.  Here’s what they mean (or at least, here is what I think they mean).

AYP =  Adequate yearly progress. This means that a school must show evidence of improving every year, a certain percentage of improvement each year till–ta da!–in 2012 we will all be at 100%. (Ask any real teacher if this would ever happen.) If your math department improved by great leaps and bounds last year, you will have to perform at even better next year. This doesn’t take into account any variations in student populations, including special ed.

Alignment = Adapting your curriculum so the things you teach will produce test scores. All right: let’s say it aloud: “teaching to the test.” A horrific movement in that direction would be “Race to the Top” funding which would require the same national tests for all schools and the use of similar textbooks everywhere.  George Orwell, glance our way.

Assessment = Test. Want a wake-up call? Go online and Google “standardized math test” and “standardized language arts test” for the grade levels you’re interested in. Take the test as an adult. Imagine taking the test as a child. You will see that the tests are designed for a monoculture of children (who probably don’t exist), using vocabulary and sentence structures that will indeed leave many children behind. You will also notice that the tests are designed for everyone to fail, at some point, as the questions get harder. Frustrating for you? Think about the kids!

Highly Qualified = Teachers who have taken a certain set of courses. The term has nothing at all to do with teaching ability. There are various levels of qualification for teaching. As an example, I have a MA in English and a state teaching license for English. I qualified with a secondary “endorsement” in visual arts, but to be Highly Qualified, I would have to take more courses and the Praxis exam. It doesn’t matter at all that my students win local and state art contests and that I think almost everyone leaves my course able to draw and paint adequately. I’m not Highly Qualified, though I am going to become so, because the Praxis is not that hard (I’ve seen some sample tests), and I’ve arranged with my state office to meet standards. Still, the term Highly Qualified is obfuscation. It implies teaching skill, but what it means is courses taken.

Research-based programs = teaching strategies that someone has run studies on and reported on. One year, our district bought a stack of books with research-based teaching strategies and handed one to every teacher. There was nothing inherently wrong with the strategies, but there was nothing to distinguish them either. Running a study on a program and publishing it makes it research-based.

School Improvement Plan = a written document including data on how students are achieving and how the school proposes to improve achievement. My experience with the school improvement plan is that it creates a great deal of work with little light shed on what to do. Perhaps the data will uncover a struggling student, but in reality, most good teachers (and that means most of the teachers I know) already know who’s struggling. Producing the School Improvement Plan means more meetings and more time writing up a document required by law.

There are many more terms; you can Google them. The important thing–to me–is that NCLB purports to help children. It is a puffed-up, self-important, hugely-complicated, very powerful piece of legislation that creates work and stress in schools, for teachers, for children. The pressure is so powerful that daily education becomes teaching to the test, and essential subjects like PE and the arts are often minimized or pushed to the side.

There’s something that the NCLB proponents forget: we are teaching real children who are having real childhoods. This is the way they are growing up: with testing pressure so strong that they may miss the humanizing aspects of growing up into whole human beings.

The Invisible Gorilla, The Illusion of Memory–and the foolishness of high-stakes testing

I’m reading a new book, The Invisible Gorilla and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. This is a vibrantly-written nonfiction book on how we remember.

Actually, it’s a book about how we don’t remember. The latest brain research shows that no matter what our intuition or emotions tell us, we only remember about 15% of our experiences (including reading and classroom experiences). That 15% may be completely wrong. To illustrate this point, the book describes a couple, driving along the road, who happens to drive right by a murder in progress. Within moments, the couple disagrees on many vital points, including what the perpetrator was wearing, what other cars and people were around, and who called 911, how long it took, and what was said.

And that is right after the event, just after! Memory disintegrates over time.

This research points out that this inability to remember is simply the human condition, not a failing in particular individuals. We’re all in this together.

However, we infer from the research that high-stakes, once-a-year testing is utter foolishness. Adequate yearly progress? Who can know? We forget almost everything. Certainly we cannot remember specific grammar rules or mathematical formulas, not many of them. Certainly we cannot remember a stack of science facts, nor dates and places from history.

Hey, legislators! President Obama! US Office of Education! School Boards!:

New brain research shows that our brains cannot remember all that stuff on the standardized tests. We are wasting your money. We are frustrating students. We are losing essential instructional time and even worse, we are engaging in questionable teach-to-the-test techniques, which are lousy at the best.

What’s the answer? Dismantle No Child Left Behind and let us move forward to good classroom instruction.