The High Cost to Public Schools of High Stakes Standardized Tests

(Adapted from a letter originally addressed to the State of Hawai‘i Board of Education)

Respected Board Members:

I am a “highly qualified” teacher with many years experience in the classroom, for the past three years at a Hawai‘i intermediate school. I served six years in the U.S. Navy and worked in the defense industry for five years before attending university and ultimately entering the teaching profession.

Like the vast majority of my colleagues, I am deeply committed to the well being of my students; I consider it my duty and calling to educate them for the life they have right now as well as for the life they imagine for themselves in the future. I am good at my job: good at opening students up to the joy of learning and discovery and exploration, good at helping them see why what they are learning should matter to them, good at helping them develop persistence and resilience and daring, good at encouraging them to see themselves as capable.

The high-stakes standardized tests I’m required to administer, however, don’t really assess my students’ growth as human beings or their mastery of the complex of skills I strive to teach; they are narrow, limited, and deeply flawed. Further, their primary purpose seems to be to provide “accountability data” on schools and teachers, but good students with good teachers at good schools do not always or automatically perform well on them—see for instance Mott Hall Bridges Academy in New York (“A Valuable School and Principal—But You Wouldn’t Know It By the Test Scores”).

With that in mind, here are my top ten problems with the high-stakes standardized tests currently so in vogue:

The test…

1. assesses a specific kind of test-taking skill. The new SBAC claims to require more than low-level, simplistic thinking, but in my experience what it mostly demands is incredible endurance.
2. serves no educational purpose. Although it labels students “proficient” (or, mostly, not) based on an ever-shifting metric, it isn’t about the students—it’s about assessing the effectiveness of teachers (again, with a very narrow definition of “effectiveness”).
3. lacks transparency. The test is administered by a company with a fiduciary responsibility to turn a profit. Test materials are proprietary intellectual property, and transparency exposes the company to potential loss.
4. unfairly penalizes schools that lack the financial resources to provide adequate technology for the test-taking enterprise. Slow or out-of-date computers, slow internet connections, insufficient numbers of computers, and more all take their toll.
5. negatively impacts instruction. Because the stakes (for schools and teachers) are so high, meaningful instruction is discarded to allow more time for “test prep” and testing itself.
6. demoralizes teachers and contributes to attrition among excellent teachers, many of whom cannot as a matter of conscience any longer subject students to “testing torment,” which robs them of the rich experiences necessary to become passionate and engaged learners.
7. steals an inordinate amount of time and attention from authentic teaching and learning. With stakes so high, the test becomes the be-all and end-all of so-called “education,” to the detriment both of education itself and education’s clients: students.
8. disengages students from school and learning, instead fostering an active animosity toward education and its institutions. Testing is utterly irrelevant to the “real lives” our students live, and when schools focus on testing to the exclusion of things that actually are relevant, students understandably stop caring.
9. sets a single bar for student “proficiency,” altogether ignoring all the myriad ways a human being can show not just proficiency but brilliance. Success, as defined by these tests, excludes almost entirely those fostered in the humanities and arts, yet success in the humanities and the arts is at least as important as success deciphering informational texts or constructing a mathematical formula.
10. demoralizes students. Students have a hard time separating a test score from their identity. When a student does not earn the coveted “proficient” rating on these limited, flawed, narrow tests, they believe that there is something wrong with them, when it isn’t them at all.

Testing is not a significant element of life outside the hallowed halls of education. Testing is not a significant part of any career. Testing is not even a major part of college. The tests a student might typically take in the course of a career or degree program are not like the tests we are forced to administer as part of so-called “accountability.” Testing does not make students more “college and career ready,” and more to the point it contributes nothing meaningful to the actual lives of students. Shouldn’t education ultimately provide students with something valuable in their actual lives as well as in their possible futures?

I believe we educators absolutely must remember that our clients—who we serve—are the students, not universities or employers or even parents. Those are all stakeholders, but they are not who we serve first and foremost. We owe our clients a “lifeworthy” education, one that is relevant to life as they already know it as well as how they hope it will be (“What’s Worth Learning in School?”), and testing as currently done is anti-lifeworthy…just ask our clients.

I thank you for your attention, and look forward to continuing our mutual service to the students with whom we are entrusted.

Sincerely,


David Negaard

Teach the Whole Child vs. College and Career Ready

I’m a teacher, and I am sick to death of the mantras of market-driven so-called “education reform,” and the one I’m sickest of (and it’s central to the Common Core State Standards so-enthusiastically adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia) is:

“College and Career Ready”

It isn’t that “College and Career Readiness” is irrelevant in education—it’s part of what school is for—but it’s only part, and far from the most important part. Like most teachers, I teach living, breathing students how to live the life they’re in right now and the life they imagine for themselves someday, and not just or even primarily “skills” to prepare them for “college and career.” To me, my students are not “future college students” or “future employees"—they are so much more—and I serve the whole child, not university deans or employer-exploiters.

When“College and Career Ready” become the primary focus in school, it demoralizes teachers, but more importantly, it marginalizes students.

Let me explain. Schoolchildren are…well, they’re children. When they’re very young, their career ambitions are simple: when I was a young boy, I wanted to be a firefighter, then a cowboy, then an astronaut, then a spy. My ambitions were informed by what was current in my life, by what was sufficiently newsworthy to fascinate the adults around me, and by what I saw in movies. “When I grow up” was a fantasy to me; I had no real idea even what that meant, and my “When I grow up” ambitions were stories I told about what was happening around me at that moment in time. The stories changed as I grew older and saw more, but even as a teenager and young adult, they were still stories.

The thing is, kids ought to tell those stories. They’re important. And kids can’t help but live in the moment—they know (as we sometimes forget) that the future isn’t real—and therein is found one problem with “College and Career Ready.”

For most students, college and career are in that unreal territory called the future. Too heavy an emphasis on college and career deprecates the only territory they know, the here and now. They have lives now, they have minds now, they have interests and passions now, they have challenges and struggles now. For school to be meaningful to them, it needs to be relevant to where they are right now, and if all we talk about is the future and how these “skills” are going to get them ready for “college and career,” we unwittingly send the message that what they’re going through now is unimportant.

Furthermore, we don’t even really know just what specific skills will be required for “College and Career Readiness” in the coming years. Things change faster and faster, and today’s must-have skill might be tomorrow’s “calligraphy” (don’t get me wrong—I admire good calligraphy—but it’s hardly a must-have job skill any more, is it?). It’s entirely possible that the world will soon shift to a largely post-employment paradigm, with automation taking over many jobs and most people living lives of leisure.

What we can do is what I and many of my colleagues try to do in our classrooms—we can coach students in creativity and empathy and critical thinking and divergent thinking and sound reasoning and powerful argument and curiosity and skepticism and enthusiasm and reflection and collaboration and discovery and imagining—and trust that that (together with nuts-and-bolts skills like reading and writing and speaking and listening and math computation and objective observation), will empower them to learn to do whatever else it is they need to do to have the life they want.

Instead of preparing them specifically for pie-in-the-sky by-and-by “college and career,” we can equip them for rich, full, reflective, meaningful, critically-examined life and engage them in that right now. We can kindle in them curiosity and skepticism and enthusiasm—for understanding and learning and discovery—and they will learn anything else they need to learn in the process of scratching that curiosity bump and answering that skepticism and responding to that enthusiasm. Do that, and they will be “College and Career Ready,” but they won’t have had to wait until college or employment to begin applying what they’ve learned; they can put those intangible principles and practices to work in their own lives starting now.

I did not become a teacher to make students compliant citizens or obedient employees. I became a teacher because the life of the mind is rich and satisfying and awesome, and I want as many people as possible to discover those same satisfactions, each in their own way. I do not work for corporations who need workers or governments who want “good citizens” or even for the Department of Education—they may employ me, but I serve my students, and they are not best served by thoughtless compliance or mindless labor.

They are best served if I can help them find their passions and coach them in pursuing them, if I can teach them not what to do, but how to decide what to do, if I can foster in them thoughtful habits and practices, if I can persuade them to be more than spectators, more than passengers, more than puppets. They are best served if they are taught how to live, and not just get by.

And I am tired of being told to do more of what is less—to teach not kids but skills, not finding meaning but reciting facts, not true appreciation but mere analysis—so when “they” tell me that I just smile and nod and (metaphorically) close my classroom door…and I teach the whole child.

I'm Okay

It’s been a rough time.

I’m “okay”—now that I value myself highly, I’m always “okay” —but this week has been hard. As happens from time to time, mortality has absurdly asserted that people I love die, an unacceptable, intolerable proposition.

Yet here I am, “accepting” it (for some definitions of “accepting”) and tolerating it (likewise). I’m “okay,” meaning I’m functioning and even constructive rather than paralyzed or destructive, and I am confident that these wounds will heal and that I will be whole again. I’m “okay.”

The thing about saying you’re “okay,” though, is that often others take you at your word. If you’re “okay,” they’ll quite naturally leave you to it, and they aren’t wrong to do so. It’s respectful—they trust you to know your own status and to speak the truth—and for most, “okay” and “good” are nearly synonyms.

Only they aren’t the same thing, not really. Nobody’s to blame for the confusion, but “okay” is worlds away from “good.”

In my lexicon, “okay” means I’ll eventually be “good”—that I have the power I need to make it so. I don’t “need” anything from anyone to get there, eventually. I can do it myself.

It does not, however, mean that no one can do anything to help. At times like these, even those who are “okay” are hurting, and comfort might be welcome. Kindness might be welcome. Touch might be welcome. Just because someone can go it alone doesn’t mean s/he has to or even wants to.

But it’s hard to ask. Some are invested in seeing themselves as (and being seen as) the steadfast rock or the comforter in time of trial—that’s (part of) who they are—and asking for comfort for themselves works against that image. Some are invested in helping others and fear that accepting help might reduce the help others receive. Some are sensitive to the troubles of others, and want to avoid adding to them. All of these are stories I tell myself.

I’m okay.