Teaching to the Test

"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."  Campbell's Law, Donald T. Campbell, 1976

Also known as "Heisenberg", pointing by analogy to the uncertainty principle by which the process of measuring something changes what is being measured.  Since No Child Left Behind (NCLB) elite opinion has been obsessing about closing achievement gaps and using high-stakes testing as  tool to achieve it.  I don't think anybody disputes that there has to be an assessment process.  I do think that high-stakes testing is not the way to do it.

Since No Child Left Behind, the distortions and corruptions to the American education system have been egregious, and it's time to recognize that this approach to improving standards has become the tail wagging the dog, and the only result has been to produce a sick and rather confused dog.  We have to get back to basics, and we have to pay attention to the fundamental health of the dog.  We have to ask ourselves what do we really want our education system to produce.  And my answer is a love of learning. If you have an educational culture that produces a love of learning, then everything else falls into place.

Don't we all want our kids to be high-spirited and free?  Don't we want them to be curious and to have developed a life-long thirst for knowledge and learning? Is that what our education system sees as its purpose?  I don't think so, and if it's there at all in our schools  it's because there are good teachers who have not let themselves be beaten down by the system that cares only about scores not about learning. 

Everybody wants to be good at something, but you can't get good at something you don't like or love to do.  You can't be a good student unless you love to learn, and you can't be a good teacher unless you love to teach. And you cannot love to teach unless  first you have developed a love of learning, because you cannot inspire in the kids you teach a love of learning unless you have it yourself and exercise it on a daily basis in the classroom.

Since NCLB We are trending toward an education system in which the love of learning is becoming irrelevant. Why? Because the only thing that matters is the scores students get on these high-stakes tests.  What I would like to see is a way of measuring the degree to which a school or an entire district has fostered a culture that values above all else a love of learning.  Everything else would fall into place, if we did.  We'd find that test scores would go up without worrying too much about them. We would use tests not as a club with which to punish teachers and principals  but as a way of identifying problems that could then be solved through a collaborative process.

Every healthy kid has within his or her soul the desire to grow and learn. Everyone wants to be capable, competent, to contribute, to have the respect and admiration of those she admires and respects.  Kids want to respect the adults in their lives, but they don't respect them, and have good reason not to when the program adults present them is at a fundamental level b.s.produced by bureaucrats with a misguided reform agenda.

It's ridiculous that we have a one-size fits all education system because we have a one-size fits all testing system. It's ridiculous that we think of education as some kind of information inculcation and testing process. Ultimately education is about relationships, the relationships kids form with one another and the ones they form with adults that they respect.  And they can't respect adult teachers, coaches, counselors, and administrators who are micromanaged, overly scripted automatons following rules that somebody in Olympia or D.C. developed with good intentions, but have created more problems than they have solved.  Kids will develop a love of learning when they are exposed to adults and peers who have a love of learning. Not people who are just going through the motions scripted for them by someone far removed from the classroom.

In the same way that kids have a natural love of learning whether they know it or not, teachers have a love of teaching whether they know it or not.  We need and education system that ignites and sustains the flame of passionate learning and passionate teaching. You can never be good at something you don't love doing.

One of my goals, should I be elected to the school board, is to push so that the system makes it easier for good teachers to do their jobs and for mediocre or burned out teachers to learn from and be inspired by the good teachers. We need to develop better methods for teachers to learn and implement best practices, but more than that we need for teachers and principals to support one another, to help one another to be as good as they can be, to remind one another why they got into the teaching business in the first place. 

We--all of us--need to remember that schools are not about implementing some elite fad of the month, but to do the basic work that has been done century in and century out at least since Socrates gathered the youth of Athens around him, i.e.,  when kids and adults, the inexperienced and experienced, the aspirants and masters come together out of a shared love of learning  to just do it.

In a future post I'd like to talk about how the International Baccalaureate curriculum and assessment process might point a way toward developing an educational culture that promotes  both a love of learning and a way to assess to what degree the learning culture at a particular school actually delivers learning.

 

Comments

[spark]

In 2008, I was thinking about getting my Education masters and going into teaching. I spoke with some teachers who told me the real deal about teaching to the test and realized that the teachers I remembered from youth, who had great latitude in the classroom, would no longer be tolerated in today's educational system. I decided against becoming a teacher.

[Jack Whelan]

Teaching to the test is bad enough, but it's even worse because the folks downtown put teachers in a double bind by giving the ineffective curricula that they insist be rigidly followed, and then blame them when half the kids fail the high-stakes assessment. Read my piece today about curriculum. http://afterthefuture.typepad.com/jack_whelan_for_school_bo/2011/06/constructivism-vs-direct-instruction-a-common-sense-approach.html

My wife has taught special ed for years and she got no end of grief for using direct instructional methods with learning disabled and ADD kids. It didn't matter that she was getting kids to grade level. She wasn't following the whole language curriculum which study after study has shown is not as effective as phonics and direct instruction for this particular population.

[Dave]

I'm happy to see you tackling this important topic. Are you familiar with the educational philosophy's of Charlotte Mason? Your mention of a love of learning made me think of her. I have a friend who runs a non-profit dedicated to promoting her ideas. Your critique of current trends in education sounds a lot like things I have heard him say. Here is his organization's website: http://www.childlightusa.org/index.php. I look forward to reading more of your posts on education related issues.

[Dave]

Uh, I mean "philosophies," not "philosophy's." I'm not expressing my points about education very well if I can't even spell and use proper punctuation. :)