Trust Teachers

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.

* See “Restoring Faith in Public Education”