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.
