The short answer, if I’m asked why I’m no longer teaching,
is that after a successful, decade-long foray into the teaching field, I failed
a multiple choice test about how to behave in a school and was banned from the
Fulton County Schools Teacher Applicant Pool.
The long answer is a bit more complex and echoes the
frustrations and fears of teachers all over the nation as our public schools
move deeper into the realm of high-stakes testing and dubious oversight and
application of those same tests.
I know that for most people, the level of interest in the
topic of testing in schools is directly related to the current involvement your
family has. If you have a kid taking a week’s
worth of tests, you care a lot that week. If not, it is yet another thing among a long
list of depressing news topics that feels too large to tackle while also paying
bills and feeding kids and basically living a life. It's about school...ugh. It's about tests at school..ugh. And it's about statistical interpretation and application of tests at school..ugh once again.
But I care so much about the state of our public school
system, and I so badly want people to have a better understanding of what the
Common Core/testing/opt-out debates are about that I am willing to share the
most humiliating moment of my adult life in an effort to explain it all in a
tangible way and to, hopefully, spur some of you to action.
There are really two items currently at the forefront of educational
reform discussions. The first is the implementation of the Common Core
Curriculum that has been adopted by the bulk of the nation in recent years. The
second is the series of tests that are being implemented with increasingly
higher stakes attached to the results of these assessments.
National Standards
The Common Core, while frustrating to many parents
attempting to help their children with newly popular methods of solving math
problems, is not actually the devil. Standards are not a new concept and have
been used by school systems across the country for decades. Before the Common
Core, Georgia had the Quality Core Curriculum (QCC) with the Georgia
Performance Standards (GPS) as a kind of bridge between the QCCs and the Common
Core GPS. As teachers, we were taught that
the standards were the “maximum tested” not the “maximum taught.”
The idea, of course, was that standards create a base level
that every student should learn in a given grade or subject and that the
teacher could then expand upon topics based on the interests or abilities of
the students. Unfortunately, the Common Core was developed as No Child Left Behind and, later, Race to the Top were implemented. These highly publicized
political programs required school systems to give assessments and report test
scores in order to maintain their federal funding. If the tests were going to
become such a large part of determining success, the standards needed to be
incredibly detailed and more rigorous.
The result is that, in an effort to create rigor, some
Common Core standards may not be developmentally appropriate, and almost all of
them eliminate the option of any expansion or fluidity in the classroom. Any “extra”
moments of time are now used to prep for the ever-looming tests.
So, if it’s not the Common Core that is sucking the joy out
of teachers and students alike, what is it?
It is the use of statistical data as the one best indicator
of student and teacher success that really has me frightened.
Numbers—Are they lying to you? How would you even know? Can
you even trust them?
My undergraduate degree is in Economics and my Master’s
degree is in Social Studies Education. The one thing I learned over and over in
my Econ classes were that statistics can be used to say whatever you want them
to. The numbers don’t lie, but the person telling you what the numbers mean
might very well be lying and you’d never know it.
When the list of SAT scores by state comes out it always makes
the news. I remember one year when the state with the highest SAT scores had
fewer total students take the test than there were seniors in the one Atlanta-area
high school in which I was teaching. In Georgia, the PSAT is given to every
Junior and college tuition is free to any student with a B average who can get into a public university. Students who may not really be contemplating college
are aware of the test and encouraged to try it if there’s a chance they could
continue their education. Comparing 400
college-bound students in one state to thousands of students who may or may not
be interested in a 4-year degree in another is pointless even if it makes great
political speaking points.
When Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) was implemented the
incredibly wealthy school at which I taught was in danger of failing our AYP
and having our name printed in the newspaper as a failing school. Why? Because
one assessment category included the percentage of classes failed by students
on free-and-reduced lunch. Our school had fewer than five students on assisted lunch
which meant that if any of them failed more than one class, we were in trouble.
That same school had a visit from the Governor of Georgia for
the next two years in a row as a reward for “most improved SAT scores.” I
should note that as a new school, juniors and seniors were not required to
transfer from their old school to ours so our scores improved simply because we
added full junior and senior classes over the next two years.
My point is that, while these scores reveal some useful information,
they don’t necessarily mean anything earth-shakingly significant. In fact, they generally reflect the relative
success of the community in which the school resides rather than anything the
teachers or students are specifically doing. We might as well just make giant
signs that say “This is an upper-middle class neighborhood with well-educated
adults and you want to buy a house here.”
Testing, Testing, 123
Much like school rankings and Newsweek lists (traditionally another random
stat based on number of AP tests given divided by number of seniors at a given
school) individual test results only share part of the story.
Tests in and of themselves are not bad. I have written,
given, and graded thousands of them. Tests are a tool. And like any tool, they
have their limitations. Politicians and real estate agents like test scores
because they are easy to understand and they make people want to live in those
districts. Teachers use them because they offer feedback and a way for the
teacher to assess his or her techniques for that unit. They also reveal some,
but by no means all, of the material a student understands and the areas in which
that student still needs to work.
However, no test, no matter how well thought out, can be
perfect. A committee I was on once analyzed a test question where the correct
answer identified a Native American group as being “violent.” Although the 8th-grade students
knew that the tribe was a war-based group, they equated “violent” with “bad”
and “Native Americans” with “good” and so they did not choose that answer.
Their black-and-white thinking (which is fairly normal at that age) hindered
their ability to answer correctly.
One year I had a student called out of an Advanced Placement
(AP) exam to take a call from her mother even though the mom knew the student was
in testing. I found the student crying in the hallway in between sections of
the exam. She wouldn’t tell me what was wrong and she went back in to finish
her test, but she did not do as well as I projected that she would.
A test score can reveal what a child has learned. But it can
also reveal that a child is hungry, or tired, or confused, or worried. I’ve
taught children who’ve lost a parent and come back to school the next day. I’ve
struggled through lessons with entire classes in tears on September 11, 2001
and in multiple other years because classmates had died that week. These are
human children and their test scores are not who they are or even what they
necessarily know about the subject over which they are being tested.
So what does any of this have to do with my failing a test
and the current plight of teachers? Two things: the culture of testing is
eliminating common sense from our schools and our children’s test scores are
being used to judge their teachers.
We’ll Let the Test Decide
In my case, I failed because I did not understand the purpose
of the assessment. In July, 2013 I was considering returning to teaching after
a few years at home with my young children. Part of the online application was
a section of 25 or so multiple-choice questions about school scenarios. In a
moment of naïve optimism I thought that these questions would be used as
interview talking points or perhaps as a teaching-style assessment similar to a
personality test. As such, I consistently chose the answers that allowed me to
gather more information about each scenario since a large part of working with
the adorable messes that are teenagers is being able to be sensitive to their thoughts
and point of view.
Unfortunately for me, it was actually a test with a
mandatory minimum score that determined whether or not I was even eligible for
an interview. I didn’t know any of that until nine months later when a former
supervisor wanted to hire me to teach in her department. She couldn’t find my application in the
system and eventually, after about a month of back and forth nonsense, I got an
answer.
It took me googling news articles about the new application
process to find a name. It took me guessing at an email address based on email
naming conventions in the school district to find a contact. It took several
emails wherein I basically demanded to know how I, a fully licensed teacher with
an exemplary record for this same district, could be considered unfit for an
interview. I finally received a phone call (which made me feel good until a
less naïve friend pointed out that the district didn’t want it in writing). The
woman on the other end told me I failed the test I didn’t know I was taking and
that I had therefore been blacklisted from the applicant pool for a period of
one year.
When I again protested and asked that she call my references
at any of a half-dozen local schools she said, “it’s an automated process and
there’s nothing I can do.”
That sentence it why I am writing this. The school district was not attempting to be
cruel and, to be fair, after my increased complaints to the superintendent and a
school board member whose kid I taught, the process has been changed. In fact, when I again had access to the questionnaire
a year later the example question I used to explain my complaints used my
suggestions almost verbatim—I wonder if I can claim a contractor fee?
The problem is that, intentional or not, there are very real
human consequences to educational testing being used as a decision-maker
instead of as an informational tool.
When a child has the possibility of being retained a grade
due to their score on one test, without the input or recommendation of his or
her teacher, we have a problem. Georgia is implementing the new Milestones tests and, right now, the tests are not being used as “gateway” tests to the next
grade. The possibility exists, however, and teachers and students are feeling the
strain of “taking the test seriously” on a regular basis.
They also create unintentional wastes of time (if you’ve
already taken the test that determines your success, what do you do for the
last three weeks of school?) and force teachers to make sure students practice
test-taking skills in class (instead of, you know, actually reading a book or conducting
an experiment or something educational).
A child’s educational future should be determined by the child’s
parents, teacher, and school working in partnership. Test scores should be part
of the data that informs those decisions rather than the ultimate word on any
student.
Your Survival Depends upon Your Child
At this moment, teachers nationwide are struggling with the
idea that their students’ test scores could be used as part of their own assessment
as educators. Good teachers don’t mind reviewing their processes and reflecting
on what they could have done better. These are the things educators think of in
the shower and in traffic and when they zone out in church. Teachers want to
get their scores back and take pride in how well their students did and look to
see if they guessed right for each individual student. The scores are a piece of information that
can be useful, but again, they don’t necessarily mean something significant.
Every parent knows that learning is not linear. When your
children learned to walk, they’d take fifteen steps forward and then suddenly
fall on their backside. Occasionally, they choke and land on their faces. What
if your success as a parent were determined by how often your kid fell down
based on a projected number of falls gleaned from last week’s fall count? Did
the kid get new shoes? Did she have a growth spurt? Is he carrying his baby
brother by the neck?
You see my point. Students are children, even the teenage
ones. What they know or understand or can accomplish under the best of
circumstances is not likely to be what you see on a random Tuesday in May. It
might be. But to decide that a teacher’s ability to teach is reflected in that
number is not good science.
Like doctors, teachers have specialties. An oncologist specializing
in rare forms of cancer is far more likely to have patient deaths than a general
pediatrician. If we compare patient mortality rates, the oncologist is going to
look like a much worse physician even if he’s the one developing revolutionary treatment
options.
A teacher might specialize in students with reading problems
or teach English language learners. High
achieving students are not likely to improve much on a standardized test from
year to year because their scores are already incredibly high. And although most
schools do not actively “track” students into groups of like-ability classes,
it inadvertently happens all the time. Scheduling realities can box teachers in
and influence the resulting test scores.
For instance, if all the really bright kids are taking advanced English
1st period and advanced chemistry 3rd period and the year-long
electives like yearbook or newspaper are in the afternoon, whoever teaches 2nd
period history just got all the gifted kids in a “regular” history class. The teacher teaching history 6th
period won’t have any gifted kids or any students taking band.
These are somewhat silly examples, but the reality is that
teachers are not doing the same job even when they are teaching the same
subject in the same school. There are too many variables to compare teachers to
one another or to assume that their test scores are primarily a reflection of
the teacher’s efforts. In addition, not all grades and subjects are tested and
that creates an even stranger component.
Is art irrelevant? What about World History? Or first grade? Georgia is
currently testing grades 3 through 8 and some, but not all, high school
subjects. What sense does that make?
Teacher Teachers—It’s all their fault
Somehow in this mess of testing craziness, the idea has come
up that in order to achieve greater student success, teachers need to be held
accountable and our schools need better teachers. And somehow THAT has translated into judging teacher preparatory programs based on the student test scores of the teachers they trained. I can’t even begin to explain how silly
this is, so I’m going to give you a real-life example (with fake names because I did not ask for their permission beforehand).
Emily, Mike, and I all graduated with Bachelor’s degrees from
the University of Georgia and all taught public high school. Emily received her
educator training at UGA and Mike and I received ours from Georgia State
University. I primarily taught in suburban Atlanta in very affluent schools. Mike teaches in inner-city Atlanta and his school has been known to have a riot
or two. Emily taught in a Yupik Eskimo fishing village on an island in the Bering
Sea before teaching illiterate teenagers in Baltimore. I am just going to point
out now that Emily and Mike are better teachers than I am if for no other reason
than that they are still fighting the good fight and I have tapped out. But
also because they are clearly doing a harder job than I ever did.
There is no way that comparing our students’ improvement on
test scores could remotely reflect accurately on our teacher preparatory programs.
What I Want You to Do
I could go on forever about this topic. The company who makes
the PARCC test, the Common Core test being given to students in multiple states, is the same company that sells textbooks, practice test materials, and
teacher training to the schools districts in which their test is given. The teacher assessment tools and models (like
the assessment I failed) are created by software companies who also develop substitute
teacher management systems for the districts in which their products are used. It
is convoluted and frustrating and we got to this point in the same way you can
boil a frog. The water has been slowly heating up for over a decade and
dedicated educators have continued to keep their heads down and hope for the
best.
Politicians decided that our schools as a whole were “failing”
and that the cure was increased academic rigor and teacher accountability. I’d
argue that our schools were not failing—our society is.
The root cause of schools that fail is poverty, not
standards or teacher accountability.
No one wants to talk about those issues, however, so we’re
creating a system that will continue to marginalize the poor while conducting a
rather elaborate and probably irrelevant experiment on the rest of the
population.
Meanwhile, teachers are sad and just want to be
given some small measure of the freedom and joy that got them into this job in
the first place. Teaching is a calling.
It is beautiful and meaningful and interacting with students can make even the
worst day worth getting up for. If we allow the proposed ideas about the use of
testing scores to continue we are going to lose every passionate teacher who
felt this call and wind up with a generation of educators who stay for 3-5
years and then get out before they lose too much of their earning potential to a job that
requires a degree, but does not treat its employees as professionals.
This week is teacher appreciation week. If you really want
to show the educators in your life some appreciation you will contact your national
and state representatives and ask that state and federal laws should reflect the following:
- Test scores should not be used with “mandatory minimums” required to promote students to the next grade, at least until high school. If a student fails a grade it should not be just because of one test score.
- Test scores or improvement on test scores should not be used to assess teachers. Data from student tests should be used to improve instruction, but pressuring teachers over their students’ test results means too much classroom time is focused on testing rather than actual learning.
- Teacher preparatory programs should not be judged based on the test scores of their graduates’ students. There are far too many variables for that to be relevant information.
Feel free to copy and paste my words into your email if you’d
like to. Share this with anyone you’d like to encourage to take action. Our
public schools belong to us and to our children and to every child who comes
after. To make sharing your opinion
easier, I’ve included links to the
U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate so that you can find your
representatives’ contact information. Many high ranking politicians, like Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education, are also on twitter and can be contacted that way. I added direct links to relevant Georgia
politicians for my district. You can also contact your local or state school board or superintendents. Your actual local school (and in many cases the entire school district) has no control over any of these decisions.
One final note—I truly have so many more things to say on
this topic so if you had a question or comment that I didn’t address feel free
to comment, email, or tweet it at me. I’d be happy to respond.
Contact Links Specific to Georgia:
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