In the 1940s when my mother was a teenager, my grandfather,
a respected businessman in their small Kansas community, taught her to drive.
When he then took her to get her license, the license clerk asked him, “Can she
drive?” My grandfather affirmed that my mother could indeed drive, and so the
clerk issued the license. No written test, no road test. To my knowledge, Mom
never had an accident over a lifetime of driving in several U.S. states and
Europe. Probably she was lucky, but she also had a good teacher who knew his
student’s abilities.
For decades now, critics have been hammering at public
school teachers. Current movements are gaining momentum in several states to
strip away collective bargaining rights and even do away with colleges of education
in our universities. Much of this undermining of the public’s confidence in
teachers is part of a broader assault on public education, as the Right pursues
its anti-democratic agenda to transform the United States into a corporate
oligarchy.
But here are some facts to ponder. In the forty-year period
between 1970 and 2010, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or
NAEP—also called “The Nation’s Report Card”—has documented consistently rising
achievement in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading scores. During the
same period the U.S. dropout rate fell from 15 percent to 7.4 percent. And yet,
over those same forty years the public’s confidence in the public schools
dropped from 58 percent to around 30 percent.* Exactly how were higher student
achievement and lower dropout rates attained except by the effective work of
good teachers in good public schools? I would argue that lack of confidence in
teachers is wholly unfounded.
State-mandated mass standardized testing continues to
grow, wasting valuable teaching time and vast sums of taxpayer money—more than
$46 million in Indiana alone—to provide limited and misleading information
about student learning. The heart of the problem is that the further assessment gets from
the classroom, the less informative it becomes. It also gets more expensive.
At
root, standardized achievement tests don’t tell us where a student started or
how far he or she progressed in learning over a given period of time.
Standardized test results, at best, tell us what a student knows within a
narrow band of knowledge on a given day. Not only are such results misleading,
in the sweep of a student’s education they are meaningless. Indiana State
Superintendent Tony Bennett would have us believe that these test results help
shape instruction. They do so only in the sense of narrowing the curriculum,
rather than enriching it; focusing on failure that may, in fact, be the fault
of factors beyond students’ and teachers’ control, instead of celebrating
success and getting help to challenged students.
Competent,
attentive teachers can use intense observation, portfolios of student work, and
classroom-based assessment to ascertain more accurately what and how students
are learning far better than any standardized test. Bear in mind that we make a
big deal of rising SAT and ACT scores. Both the SAT and the ACT are designed to
help predict whether a student will be successful in higher education—nothing
more than that. But what has the research shown to be a better predictor? High
school grades. The reason is simple: A course grade represents a composite
evaluation of a student’s achievement based on multifaceted assessment by the
student’s teacher.
The
same principle applies at all levels of schooling. Teachers interact with their
students every day and are far more accurate in assessing student achievement
than standardized tests. The fiscal bonus is that we already pay teachers to do
this work. So why send millions of taxpayer dollars to testing corporations to
give us flawed information when we already get good information from the professionals
we already employ? We need to trust our teachers.
