I don’t love grades and grading. I love giving students feedback—feedback fosters learning—but I actively hate setting a value on a given task and assessing a student’s performance on that task as a portion of that value. What about the rest of the story—the student’s growth, the student’s struggles, the student’s discoveries, the student’s development as a scholar and a human being—that grades on assignments never adequately capture?
And tests! I really hate tests. Left to my own devices, students in my classes would never take tests; I believe that other tasks—e.g. writing assignments, projects, and presentations—provide a much richer indication of a student’s learning than do tests.
Alas, I’m not left to my own devices.
Public school teachers everywhere are required to administer mandated tests which they did not write and which in fairness they should not include in their grade calculations. As a public school teacher, I, too, am required to administer certain tests. At my current school, where I see my students approximately 144 hours in a 180 day school year, mandated tests include:
- STAR Reading (twice/year at 2 hours per for 4 hours)
- Benchmark Assessments (BMAs: 8 times/year at 2 hours per for 16 hours)
- Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium test (SBAC: once/year at 8 or more hours)
- EXPLORE Test (pre-ACT: once/year at 2 hours)
There’s one reason teachers may be demoralized: being required to spend a significant fraction of precious instructional time administering tests of dubious merit when we know that our students learn little from taking them.
Believe it or not, the vast majority of teachers are passionately committed to their students’ learning. And while somewhere along the line most of us were indoctrinated with the idea that tests provided meaningful measures of student achievement (and if we write them to assess student mastery of the skills, concepts, and content we are teaching, they may), very few of us are anywhere near so committed to testing.
Testing is intimately connected to another factor that contributes to poor teacher morale: the deceptively named Educator Effectiveness System (or whatever it’s called outside of Hawai‘i—something like it exists in most states of the United States).
EES (or whatever) purports to measure the effectiveness of teachers, but both the presumptions that underlie it and the methodology itself institutionally demean teachers. The presumption is that teachers are terrible until they prove themselves otherwise, and the means by which teachers are required to prove themselves deserving of their (not exactly lucrative) salaries and (not exactly elevated) jobs are tedious, arbitrary, and insulting. Furthermore, those same high-stakes-for-schools, low-stakes-for-students tests (which only test how well students take them) are linked to educator effectiveness, meaning that teachers are held accountable not just for what they can control—e.g. classroom climate, delivery of concepts and content, quality of instruction—but also for what is beyond their control—e.g. home environment; extracurricular stresses; preexisting physiological, mental, and emotional factors.
The work itself—guiding student learning, fostering critical thinking and inquiry, igniting curiosity and a love of knowledge—is rewarding, but that considerable reward is significantly offset by the presumption that teachers are incompetent, the demand that we spend tens of hours of time performing and documenting work—work that does not necessarily or even usually contribute to our students’ growth as learners—in order to justify our existence, not to mention those not-so-lucrative salaries and the poor esteem in which we are generally held by the public whose children we serve...
I love teaching, and I know how fashion shifts in education as in anything else—if I don’t like the way things are done now, all I have to is wait a few years and I’ll have something different to dislike. I love teaching, but I tell any prospective teacher who will listen to do something else.
Teaching is both rewarding and heartbreaking, and the current educational climate, driven by a “reform” philosophy and the commercial interests of “Big Ed,” adds discouragement and tedium to the heartbreak. It’s hard, sometimes, to see the reward in light of what can feel like punishment.
And the coda is, morale is an important element of teacher effectiveness. Demoralized teachers have a harder time being effective than do teachers with high morale.
