Is Resistance Really Futile?

Public school people—teachers to a lesser degree because they have less power, administrators and school boards to a greater degree because they have more power—have collaborated in the assault on public education by policy makers bent on privatizing and corporatizing truly public schools out of existence. Resistance is necessary, though difficult to be sure. But is it futile? I don’t believe so.

What if, for example, school people stopped buying into the notion that school curricula must, in our standardized test-driven era, be reduced to teaching to the test? School “leaders” have forced the operational notion on many classroom teachers—and convinced many parents—that tests measure excellence and, thus, to achieve excellence all teaching must be concentrated directly on succeeding at the tests. In other words, teachers are compelled to teach to the test. Some teachers do this willingly; others are scared not to. This attitude narrows curricula, cutting out important learning and, in fact, diminishing learning in precisely those areas that are the focus of testing.

Simply put, teaching to the test doesn’t work. So why don’t we stop doing that and, instead, teach well-rounded curricula that allow students to excel in areas that truly interest them while gaining the so-called basics that are tested by the invasive, over-priced tests foisted on schools by misguided (and, in some cases, not even well-meaning) policy makers?

Explicating the ills of teaching to the test would take more space than is practical in this blog and so I’ll point readers to two worthwhile articles. The first is “How Standardized Testing Damages Education,” a July 2012 update on FairTest, The National Center for Fair and Open Testing, at http://fairtest.org/. Because international comparisons are so important to policy makers, however ill-conceived and misused such comparisons are, it is worth noting in this report: “The U.S. is the only economically advanced nation to rely heavily on multiple-choice tests. Other nations use performance-based assessment to evaluate students on the basis of real work such as essays, projects and activities. Ironically, because these nations do not focus on teaching to multiple-choice and short-answer tests, they score higher on international exams.”

A second article is Craig Jerald’s “Teach to the Test? Just Say No,” a July 2006 article on Reading Rockets at http://www.readingrockets.org/article/26096. The article is even more pertinent today than it was nearly a decade ago. Jerald writes, “It is time to overturn the common assumption that teaching to the test is the only option schools have when faced with high-stakes testing. Over-reliance on ‘drill and kill’ and test-preparation materials is not only unethical in the long-term but ineffective in the short-term.”

Resistance to the pervasive yet unfounded notion that standardized tests must perforce control curricula and teaching must become a priority of school people. Absent a reassertion that teaching is much, much more than testing—or teaching to the test—public schools will continue along a path to obsolescence and eventual abandonment as thinking parents seek alternatives and rapacious policy makers jump in to offer privatized, corporatized schools that are the antithesis of public education for the common good of American democracy.