Standardized Testing

by Donna Schoenkopf

These days testing and test scores are a big deal in public schools.

Let’s take a look at people who are concerned about test scores—upper management of school systems, unions, curriculum creators, textbook folks, and professional development people.

 

Upper Management

 I define upper management as the Secretary of Education of the United States and superintendents of state educational systems, superintendents of school districts, and various middle management folks.

When I listen to the highest of them on television, making pronouncements, using all the correct lingo, I cringe. As far as I’m concerned, they have no idea what Real School is all about. But they sure have the jargon down. Watching them is like watching the teacher at school who wears a suit and tie and polished shoes every day but who is actually the worst teacher on campus. The clothes do not make the man. Dude.

Test scores are extremely important to upper management. In fact, when I hear talk about public education and how well or how poorly it’s doing, their response is invariably about standardized test scores.

You would think that the term “standardized test” would mean that all the testing is the same across the board, in every state, every district, everywhere.

Well, it’s not.

Did you know there is no such thing as a single universal standardized test? When we talk about our world-wide academic ranking, I wonder how the rankings were made, because every country has its own standardized tests and curriculum.

I am hoping that there is a science out there that adds and subtracts and multiplies and divides until disparate things can be put altogether and then these things can be ranked on something everyone agrees on.

I just wonder what that is.

Here in the U.S. we have a whole bunch of different standardized tests.

In fact, we have several in the Los Angeles Unified School System, alone.

Standardized tests are usually objective tests that are created by commercial test publishers, although some states create standardized testing programs on their own and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is also taken under standardized conditions. Other names of standardized tests that you may be familiar with include the California Achievement Tests (CAT), the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS), the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT), the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS), and the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, to name a few popular tests.

—Carolyn Boccella Bagin, American Institutes for Research (1989)

The tests above are all in California and don’t include the standardized test for English Language Learners, which assesses English language skills.

Let me emphasize ... there is nothing standardized about standardized testing. The variables are legion.

Since test scores are seen as the raison d’etre of education (by some), you won’t hear any mention of what else schools and teachers do besides score well or poorly on tests.

Have you ever heard Arne Duncan talk about classroom environment or the the inequity in the actual standardized tests?

Have you ever heard any of our district superintendents (in the never-ending parade of superintendents) speak about the health of students or the breakfast or lunch programs or grass on the playground?

But let’s talk about solutions to all this, shall we?

(Ahem.)

The solution for problems with upper management:

If a person is to be employed as the head of anything in the educational world, he or she must be qualified for the job by having deep classroom experience. (More than three years, Michelle Rhee!)

I’m not kidding.

Study after study shows that the single most important thing contributing to successful students is... TEACHERS!

Would you employ a lawyer to be a doctor? Would you employ a pilot to be a horse trainer?

A teacher at the head of the educational system, whether it be federal or local or anything else in between, will know what happens in a classroom and what a teacher needs in order to do his or her job.

Upper management folks should not be hired because they have been administrators, CEOs, generals or law enforcement people. Management or administrative skills can be assigned to others. Think about the organizational plan in Presidential administrations. The President is the person with the vision. The administrators carry out the vision. You know. Like the Chief of Staff and the rest of those folks.

The vision of how schools succeed should come from a teacher.

One other thing is very important. We must stop the constantly changing personnel in those upper management positions. I know we can’t fix the rotating Secretary of Education because new Presidents are elected every four to eight years. We must deal with that. But the rotating superintendents! We can remedy that. As a teacher in LAUSD, I saw many, many, many superintendents hired and fired during my time there, all of whom started from scratch, wanted to put their mark on things, changed the direction of our large, lumbering system, messed up the books (of which I am currently a victim!), and really had very little idea of what to do with the mess they inherited. And then, after a couple of years ... they were gone.

 

Teacher Unions

I love my union, United Teachers of Los Angeles. I know we are fighters for justice, we care about teachers and students, we do not protect ineffective teachers—contrary to general belief—but we do protect the rights of teachers, which includes a fair hearing when they are found wanting in one way or another. (We are in America, after all.)

I have watched the political right wing castigate teachers’ unions with such hatred that eventually the general public began to believe it and now there is a general consensus that teachers’ unions are what’s wrong with public schools.

They are not.

They are one of the major reasons our schools do as well as they do. Unions believe fervently in public schools. They open their mouths and speak truth to power. If it weren’t for our teachers’ unions, we would have a horrible, punitive, ineffective, prison system called school. Trust me on this.

But we, the union and I, disagree, somewhat, on one thing—testing.

UTLA, and most teachers’ unions, say that you cannot judge a teacher or a school solely by test scores. On that we agree.

But UTLA and I go separate ways when they find almost no use for test scores. The union says that we teachers should not be particularly concerned with them, that no assessment of a teacher should be based on test scores, and if we start using test scores as the indicator of effectiveness, teachers will become just a cog in the machine and creativity in the classroom will die.

I do agree that test scores should never, ever be the sole determinant of whether or not a teacher is successful. But, in my humble opinion, test scores are useful.

When I was a union rep I would speak up at meetings saying that if we ignored test scores we would be setting ourselves up for charges of protecting “bad” teachers and that we would be the object of ridicule and scorn. I said that to ignore test scores is to ignore the one (semi-) objective thing the human mind has come up with that will give some sort of picture about what is happening in our public schools. Unless the public can get (semi-) objective information about their schools (which is the best we can ever hope for,) people will believe in every rumor and every attempt to do away with public schools that comes down the pike. When the public sees schools as pits of incompetence and failure instead of shining beacons of human endeavor, then those who can (meaning people with money) will pull their children out of the public school system, creating yet another example of class injustice—a society even more segregated into the haves and have nots than we have now.

My solutions?

The union must get rid of thinking test scores are evil.

The union must provide professional development that will concentrate on teachers having their students do well on tests. Teach teachers to teach smart.

The unions should push for decent test preparation materials for all classrooms. (A little aside here: Several years ago, while I was attending a union meeting, I brought up the subject of decent test prep materials and I was completely shut down because “we don’t want people to think teachers are teaching to the test.”)

The unions should stop the mantra that teachers should not teach to the test.

(I have never understood that one. What the hell does that mean??? As it stands today, a rich parent can pay for private tutoring for standardized testing, a private school can purchase all kinds of very specific test prep material, and white middle class parents already give their kids, on a daily basis, the language and the culture that is currently tested in those “standardized” tests. The rest of us are actually discouraged from “teaching to the test.” If you are reading this you probably are an adult. Have you ever had a math concept taught in school and not been tested on it? Have you ever read something with comprehension questions at the end? Have you ever had a typing class or a P.E. class where you were tested every day on what you had learned previously? What the HELL does it mean to “not teach to the test?” ’Splain it to me, Lucy.

The unions should push for fewer discrete concepts taught per subject, per year. (I will remind you that Japan has roughly ten math concepts a year, while the U.S. has thirty.)

If need be, we need to strike about that one.

The unions should push for better textbooks and not rubber stamp what the corporate interests want the district to buy. The union should be part of the design and content of those text books. We should strike on that one, too.

What should be taken into consideration when designing those books? The test-takers themselves.

In my career as a teacher I had the following: non-English speakers, limited English speakers, dyslexic children, children with emotional problems, brilliant children, slow and steady children, hyperactive children, children who hadn’t gone to bed until very, very late the night before and who were sleepy and cranky the next day, children whose parents were fighting, children who lived in motels. All the children I taught were nonwhite, poor or next to poor. Their mothers and fathers or grandparents worked a lot or not at all. The children I taught were not white or middle class.

But they were tested as though they were.

Today I watched the news about the shooting in Arizona. First they interviewed a Latino man, Daniel Hernandez, Rep. Giffords’ aide. He saved her life by running into the shooting and stopping the bleeding from the gun wound in her head. Then our African American President, Barack Obama, came on the air and spoke about what happened. Then a young Korean surgeon, Dr. Rhee, came on to speak about Gabby’s condition.

I felt so proud of America at that moment. All those ethnicities. All those races of people, here in America, in important positions, all capable, all heroic. We are becoming a diverse culture with the beginnings of real advancement for all people, no matter what their ethnicity. We are far, far beyond white.

And that is a very, very good thing.

 

Designers of Curriculum, Textbooks, and Professional Development

The curriculum folks are not speaking at all about there being too many discrete concepts in the curriculum or how they would change things so we didn’t teach the same thing, year after year, on the average of six years per concept.

There are so many concepts that very little time is actually spent on each one (about a week), so that even with all that repetition, year after year, it’s hard for those concepts to be imprinted in dear little brains.

AND curriculum is rubber stamped year after year because midlevel administrators in the district don’t want to offend the powers that be—the big bosses or the corporate interests. They just go along to get along.

My solutions:

A top to bottom Real School evaluation of the curriculum. Make one concept lead to another, with enough time for students to practice each one and get familiar with it before moving on. Less is more.

Encourage those who speak out about problems in the curriculum instead of shutting them down. Reward good ideas. With money.

Make sure that successful teachers are the reviewers. Pay them.

Problem:

The curriculum is bloated and contains a lot of material that is never tested on the standardized tests.

Solution:

Have the standardized testing MATCH the curriculum. DUH!

Problem:

I already wrote about the misguided design of the textbooks in our school district in my piece last week. The swirling sentences and multi-colored ink in the texts are disastrous for English language learners or for kids with dyslexia (for instance.)

My solution:

Look back at old textbooks, especially their print size, sentence structure, margins, and content. Look at their chapter reviews. Look at illustrations. Look at how vocabulary is introduced and defined. I dug old textbooks out of storage rooms at my school and bought some at garage sales. My students would never, ever have done as well as they did if I hadn’t done that. The new textbooks were virtually indecipherable to them, but the old ones were accessible and taught, in a clear and concise way, everything they needed to know about reading comprehension, math ideas, science and social studies.

Make sure successful teachers, both inner city and suburban, are involved in all decisions and reviews and are encouraged to speak up about problems or good practices.

Problem:

Professional development, for the most part, is a joke. Teachers generally hate it, it’s irrelevant to their work lives, and it sucks money away from teachers and into the hands of owners of fancy hotels, expensive restaurants, well-paid “experts,” and parking lot owners. It is a real racket. “Professional development” is full of thick binders full of useless information which will mostly be unread and kept on the back shelves of classroom cupboards to be brought out and put in prominent places when administrators do walk-throughs.

Classes are often held in fancy hotels. But the fancy hotels have small meeting rooms jammed full of round tables.  Round tables. Heh. That puts half the teachers facing backwards. Binders are too big for the tables and fall off or are put under chairs. No one can walk through the room because there is no room. It’s a claustrophobic nightmare.

Real fancy on the outside, real stupid on the inside.

The lessons themselves have very little relevance to actual teaching. Mostly it is the promotion of the latest program or system the district has foisted on teachers and their students.

A lot of professional development is “make and take,” meaning working with art materials for little games for students’ learning centers. Hours and hours of time are spent cutting and pasting and assembling. Most of the games are never used in class because teachers don’t have time for them. (Remember? We have to teach one concept a week. No time for anything else.)

Most professional development is demeaning, irrelevant, and downright monetary theft from schools. But “professional development” sure sounds good. Pure jargon.

My solution:

Professional development should consist of teachers teaching teachers mostly at their own school. On very few occasions should large numbers of teachers assemble for professional development and it should never, ever be at a fancy hotel. Give the money saved to ... TEACHERS!

Have new teachers visit successful teachers in their classrooms for the whole day or more. Have them take special note of the organization of the class, the disciplinary practices of the teacher, the room environment.

Jeez. Once you get me started ...

Comments

Comments closed.

Copyright © 2012 Four Story Inc.         Home         Staff         Privacy         Contact