a most important essay...

"The increasingly massive and far-reaching use of conventional standardized tests is one of the most effective, if unintentional, vehicles this country has created for suppressing creativity."
-- Robert J. Sternberg



http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2006/02/22/24sternberg.h25.html?querystring=Robert%20Sternberg&levelId=1000

Published: February 22, 2006
Commentary

Creativity Is a Habit
Robert J. Sternberg

The increasingly massive and far-reaching use of conventional standardized tests is one of the most effective, if unintentional, vehicles this country has created for suppressing creativity.

Creativity is a habit. The problem is that schools sometimes treat it as a bad habit. And the world of conventional standardized tests we have invented does just that. Try being creative on a standardized test, and you will get slapped down just as soon as you get your score. That will teach you not to do it again.

It may sound paradoxical that creativity, a novel response, is a habit, a routine response. But creative people are creative largely not by any particular inborn trait, but because of an attitude toward their work and even toward life: They habitually respond to problems in fresh and novel ways, rather than allowing themselves to respond in conventional and sometimes automatic ways.

Like any habit, creativity can either be encouraged or discouraged. The main things that promote the habit are (a) opportunities to engage in it, (b) encouragement when people avail themselves of these opportunities, and (c) rewards when people respond to such encouragement and think and behave creatively. You need all three. Take away the opportunities, encouragement, or rewards, and you will take away the creativity. In this respect, creativity is no different from any other habit, good or bad.

Suppose, for example, you want to encourage good eating habits. You can do so by (a) providing opportunities for students to eat well in school and at home, (b) encouraging students to avail themselves of these opportunities, and then (c) praising young people who use the opportunities to eat well. Or suppose you want to discourage smoking. You can do so by (a) taking away opportunities for engaging in it (by prohibiting smoking in various places, or by making the price of cigarettes so high people scarcely can afford to buy them), (b) discouraging smoking (advertisements showing how smoking kills), and (c) rewarding people who do not smoke (with praise, or even preferred rates for health- and life-insurance policies).

This may sound too simple. It's not. Creative people routinely approach problems in novel ways. Creative people habitually: look for ways to see problems that other people don?t look for; take risks that other people are afraid to take; have the courage to defy the crowd and to stand up for their own beliefs; believe in their own ability to be creative; seek to overcome obstacles and challenges to their views that other people give in to; and are willing to work hard to achieve creative solutions.

Educational practices that may seem to promote learning may inadvertently suppress creativity, for the same reasons that environmental circumstances can suppress any habit. These practices often take away the opportunities for, encouragement of, and rewards for creativity. The increasingly massive and far-reaching use of conventional standardized tests is one of the most effective, if unintentional, vehicles this country has created for suppressing creativity. I say "conventional" because the problem is not with standardized tests, per se, but rather with the kinds of tests we use. And teacher-made tests can be just as much of a problem.
Conventional standardized tests encourage a certain kind of learning and thinking, the kind of learning and thinking for which there is a right answer and many wrong answers. To create a multiple-choice or short-answer test, you need a right answer and many wrong ones. Problems that do not fit into the right answer-wrong answer format do not lend themselves to multiple-choice and short-answer testing. Put another way, problems that require divergent thinking are inadvertently devalued by the use of standardized tests.

This is not to say knowledge is unimportant. On the contrary, we cannot think creatively with knowledge unless we have the knowledge with which to think creatively. Knowledge is a necessary, but in no way sufficient, condition for creativity. The problem is that schooling often stops short of encouraging creativity. Teachers and parents are often content if students have the knowledge.

Examples of ways to encourage creative thinking are legion. If students are studying American history, they might take the opportunity to think creatively about how we can learn from the mistakes of the past to do better in the future. Or they can think creatively about what would have happened, had a certain historical event not come to pass, such as the Allies' defeat of the Nazis in World War II. But there is no one "right" answer to such questions, so they are not likely to appear on a conventional standardized test. In science, students can design experiments, but here again, such activities do not fit neatly into a multiple-choice format.

In literature, alternative endings to stories can be imagined, or what the stories would be like if they took place in a different era. In mathematics, students can invent and think with novel number systems. In foreign languages, they can invent dialogues with people from other cultures. But the emphasis in most tests is on the display of knowledge, often inert knowledge that may sit in students' heads, yet be inaccessible for actual use.

Essay tests might seem to provide a solution to such problems, but as they are typically used, they don't. Increasingly, essay tests can be and are scored by machine. Often, human raters of essays provide ratings that correlate more highly with machine grading than with the grading of other humans. Why? Because they are scored against one or more implicit prototypes, or models of what a "correct" answer should be. The more the essay conforms to one or more prototypes, the higher the grade. Machines can detect conformity to prototypes better than humans, so essay graders of the kind being used today succeed in a limited form of essay evaluation. Thus, the essay tests that students are being given often do not encourage creativity, rather, they discourage creativity in favor of model answers that conform to one or more prototypes.

Oddly enough, then, the very "accountability" movement that is being promoted as fostering solid education is, in at least one crucial respect, doing the opposite: It is discouraging creativity at the expense of conformity. The problem is the very narrow definition of accountability involved. But proponents of this notion of accountability often make it sound as though those who oppose them oppose any accountability, whereas they in fact may oppose only the narrow form of accountability conventional tests generate. The tests are not "bad" or "wrong," per se, just limited in what they assess. But they are treated as though they assess broader ranges of skills than they actually do.

Why is creativity even important? It is important because the world is changing at a far greater pace than it ever has before, and people need constantly to cope with new and unusual kinds of tasks and situations. Learning in this era must be lifelong, and people constantly need to be thinking in new ways. The problems we confront, whether in our families, communities, or nations, are novel and difficult, and we need to think creatively and divergently to solve these problems. The technologies, social customs, and tools available to us in our lives are replaced almost as quickly as they are introduced. We need to think creatively to thrive, and, at times, even to survive.

But this often is not how we are teaching children to think; quite the contrary. So we may end up with "walking encyclopedias" who show all the creativity of an encyclopedia. In a recent best seller, a man decided to become the smartest person in the world by reading an encyclopedia cover to cover. The fact that the book sold so well is a testament to how skewed our conception has become of what it means to be smart. Someone could memorize that or any other encyclopedia, but not be able to solve even the smallest novel problem in his or her life.

Encouraging the creativity habit does not mean forsaking evaluation. Essays, projects, and performances can be evaluated for creativity in terms of how novel they are (originality), how good they are (quality), and how appropriate they are to the assignment that was given. Research by Teresa Amabile at the Harvard Business School, as well as by my own group at the Center for the Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise, currently at Yale and soon moving to Tufts, shows that raters can be trained to assess creative thinking reliably and validly.

If we want to encourage creativity, we need to promote the creativity habit. That means we have to stop treating it as a bad habit. We have to resist efforts to promote a conception of accountability that encourages children to accumulate inert knowledge, with which they learn to think neither creatively nor critically. Rather, we should promote the kind of accountability in which students must show they have mastered subject matter, but also can think analytically, creatively, and practically with it.

Robert J. Sternberg, a psychologist, is the dean of the school of arts and sciences at Tufts University, in Medford, Mass. He also directs the Center for the Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise, now located at Yale University, but soon to move to Tufts.

Vol. 25, Issue 24, Pages 47,64

it gets lonely when you are waiting for responses...

I decided to compose a letter to the teachers.

( the problem is, I have no way to get it to them....)

A letter to the Teachers

Dear Teachers:

I am most concerned about the selection of the next superintendent and would like to know about and support your active interest in this process.

As a parent of two students in our public schools and as an advocate for meaningful policy in our schools, my interests include my determination to see the teachers’ opinions, knowledge, and participation reflected in the core decisions made about curriculum and course development. The policies of the previous superintendent excluded teachers’ voices in issues of their expertise. The progressive disregard for teachers’ volition and professional input damaged the spirit of many seasoned professionals. My interest currently is engaged by the prospect of a candidate who has demonstrated abilities in support and encouragement of teachers.

Without a public, strong, and unified voice from the teachers about their experiences, I am afraid that the selection committee will choose a candidate who reflects their loyalty to our county school board and will overlook the importance of a candidate who has devoted efforts to a sound curriculum and has supported teacher-initiated classroom instruction and creative development in all school-related issues and all the other practical aspects that necessitate daily collaborative efforts between teachers and administrators in our schools. I am interested in hearing from the teachers about the importance of being treated honestly, with dignity and respect, by a candidate who will include them in planning and decisions about policies that affect their professional lives and in turn affect the lives and learning of our students.

If we take a stand and become involved in this important selection, I believe we can make our best efforts count, and we can be heard if the teachers and the parents can become informed and focused on the issues of greatest urgency. I believe it is crucial for the future of our school system, our teachers, and our students that we begin a dialogue and invest our energies in making known the impact of NCLB in our classrooms. Our last superintendent’s allegiance and adherence to the principles of this act were basic to his goals. His rapid changes in curriculum and assessment protocol and his demands for standardization and the systematic exclusion of teachers’ input were all, in part, results of his allegiance to this act. NCLB will extinguish the profession of teaching at its basic level of creativity and individuality if we do not act to expose its damage.

We have this opportunity now, I believe, to make a better choice. Including the voices of the teachers is so important now. If you agree that having a say in the selection of our next superintendent is a priority, and if you believe that the teachers’ voices must be included in that selection, I am in full agreement with you and will lend my support and my energy toward that goal.

Thank you for your time and devotion at this crucial time.

i return to this...often

Leaving Public Schools Behind

Stan Karp


IT IS A MEASURE of how far the right is reaching that the left today finds itself defending the very existence of public education from the forces of privatization, commercialization, and even federal policy. Just four years after 1996 Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole campaigned on a platform of abolishing the Department of Education, the Bush administration came into office with a massive expansion of the federal role in education as its number one domestic priority. This time, however, the goal was not to extend the federal government's historic role as a promoter of educational access and equity, but to replace it with a conservative agenda of punitive high stakes testing, privatization, and market "reforms." The euphemistically named Bush education bill, the No Child Left Behind Act, was passed in December 2001 with overwhelming Republican and Democratic support (381-41 in the House, 87-10 in the Senate.). While the bipartisan coalition that supported passage of NCLB has since fragmented, its initial creation reflected the bill's merger of the corporate-centrist agenda of standards and tests with the right's agenda of vouchers ("choice"), and privatization.

Like most effective political strategies, NCLB rhetoric also spoke to real concerns held by large numbers of people, particularly those that have been badly served by public education. These concerns included persistent racial gaps in student achievement, a lack of institutional accountability, and seemingly intractable school failure in low-income communities of color. These very real problems have provided a platform for school reformers of all shapes and sizes to posture as champions of the underserved and underprivileged. For Bush, education reform has always been an "outreach" issue. He came into office as a dubiously elected president with historically low levels of support among African Americans and a well-deserved anti-poor, pro-business image. Education is one of the few areas that allow a Republican president to posture, however disingenuously, as an ally of poor people of color. By focusing on the lowest performing schools and the racial dimensions of the achievement gap (e.g., the "soft bigotry of low expectations"), Bush has given his education rhetoric an edge and an urgency it would otherwise lack. However, he has used this rhetoric, both as Texas governor and later as president, to frame policy proposals that have reinforced the "hard bigotry" of institutional racism in education, for example, by promoting higher dropout rates and perpetuating funding inequities. (Combining rhetorical concern for the victims of inequality with policies that perpetuate it may be an operative definition of "compassionate conservatism.")

But the common ground that really gave birth to NCLB was the standards movement. And this traces back to the first "education president," George Bush the elder, and to the Governors' Education Summits promoted by then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton. The standardize-and-test strategy, now enshrined in NCLB and raised to new and absurd heights by the "adequate yearly progress'" (AYP) formulas that NCLB is currently imposing on your local neighborhood school, was made possible by a decade of promoting standards and tests as the key to school improvement. Standardized curricula imposed through ever-more suffocating layers of standardized testing have become the primary instruments of mainstream, business-led school reform. They are tools used to impose external political and bureaucratic agendas on local schools and districts and to push more democratic approaches to school reform aside.

The standards and testing movement has done even more than the privatization schemes of the voucher supporters to move school power away from teachers, classrooms, schools, and local districts, and to put it in the hands of state and national politicians. Such uses of standards and testing in the service of larger policy objectives is exactly what a number of Republican strategists have been proposing for years. As Nina Shokraii Rees, a former Heritage Foundation researcher who is now an official in the Department of Education wrote before Bush took office, "Standards, choice, and fiscal and legal autonomy in exchange for boosting student test scores increasingly are the watchwords of education reform in America. The principle can be used in programs that apply to whole districts as well as entire states. Importantly, it lays the groundwork for a massive overhaul of education at the federal level in much the same way that welfare reform began."

Currently, the No Child Left Behind Act has schools across the country reeling as its impact unfolds in numbing bureaucratic detail. As many as 80 percent of the nation's public schools may find themselves labeled as schools "needing improvement," on the narrow basis of annual test scores and unreachable performance targets. The scheme uses achievement gaps among up to 10 different groups of students to label schools as "failures," without providing the resources or support needed to eliminate them. It includes an unfunded mandate that by 2014, 100 percent of all students, including special education students and English-language learners, must be proficient on state tests. Schools that do not reach increasingly unattainable test score targets face an escalating series of sanctions up to and including possible closure and the imposition of private management on public schools.

Instead of an appropriate educational strategy, NCLB's test and punish formula is part of a calculated political campaign to leave schools and children behind as the federal government retreats from the nation's historic commitment to improving universal public schooling for all children. The sanctions that NCLB imposes have no record of success as school improvement strategies, and in fact are not educational strategies at all. They are political strategies designed to bring a kind of market reform to public education. They will do little to address the pressing needs of public schools but they will create a widespread perception of systemic failure, demoralize teachers and school communities, and erode the common ground that a universal system of public education needs to survive. The privatization agenda in NCLB is reflected most clearly in its provisions for school transfers and supplemental services. (A straightforward voucher program was taken out of the original proposal as part of the legislative compromise that got it passed, though the administration continues to pursue vouchers through separate means.) Instead, NCLB has provisions that require a district to spend up to 20 percent of its federal funds to support transfers from failing schools to schools that meet their AYP targets or that don't receive Title I funds. And each state is supposed to prepare a list of approved supplemental tutorial providers for students who remain in schools needing improvement.

So far, over 60 percent of these providers are private companies. Both the transfer and the tutorial provisions have lots of complications, but there will be several overall effects: 1. The 20 percent figure will come nowhere near to covering the costs of providing transportation and tutorial services to all those eligible for them. 2. There are nowhere near enough alternative school placements for the growing numbers of students eligible to transfer. 3. The funds used to support individual tutorial services and transfers will reduce the sums available for whole school improvement in those same schools. One key part of this effort to open the public system to privatization involves a special appeal to parents, particularly in poor communities, to support NCLB's federally required tests and, especially, to utilize the law's "choice" and "supplemental tutorial" provisions.

The idea is to create pressure for more privatization of the public system. In their voucher campaigns, conservatives have learned how to repackage market "reforms" that privatize public services as a form of "parental choice." Similarly, NCLB encourages parents to leave public schools behind and appeals to them as individual consumers of educational services as part of an effort to replace local control of institutions like schools with marketplace reforms that substitute commercial relations between customers for democratic relations between citizens. NCLB, however, does not guarantee parents any new places to go. In districts where some schools are labeled "failing" and some are not, the new law is actually forcing increased class sizes by transferring students without creating new capacity. NCLB does not invest in building new schools in failing districts. It does not make rich suburban districts open their doors to students from poor districts. And it doesn't give poor parents any more control over school bureaucracies than food stamps give them over supermarkets.

The transfer regulations are a "supply-side" fraud designed to manufacture a demand for alternative school placements and ultimately to transfer funds and students to profit-making private school corporations through vouchers. The link between NCLB's "options for parents" and the administration's voucher and privatization plans is clearly reflected in the Department of Education's implementation efforts. The DOE has given multi-million dollar grants to pro- voucher groups like the Black Alliance for Educational Options, the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options, and the Greater Educational Opportunities Foundation to encourage parents to utilize the tutorial and transfer provisions of NCLB. The grants are just another example of how the federal agencies charged with overseeing and improving public education are now run by people intent on dismantling it.

Similarly, NCLB's obsessive overreliance on standardized tests in the name of accountability is more than bad education policy. It is a political effort to push other more democratic approaches to school improvement aside. When schools become obsessed with test scores, they narrow the focus of what teachers do in classrooms and limit their ability to serve the broader needs of children and their communities. Overreliance on testing diverts attention and resources from more promising school improvement strategies, like smaller schools and class size, multicultural curriculum reform, and collaborative, school-based professional development.

High-stakes tests push struggling students out of school, promote tracking, and encourage schools to adopt developmentally inappropriate practices for younger children, special needs students, and English Language Learners in an effort to "get them ready for the tests." Overuse of testing can also encourage cheating scandals and makes schools and students vulnerable to inaccurate and, at times, corrupt practices by commercial testing firms. Standards and testing, especially as they have been implemented in recent decades, are not designed to make schools accountable to students, their families, or their communities, or even to educators. They are designed to increase the ability of external political and educational bureaucracies to impose top-down, "systemic" control on curriculum, instructional practice, and other matters of educational policy.

Even if the goals did include real educational accountability, standardized tests are of limited value. Assessing the effectiveness of a particular school or program requires multiple measures of academic performance, including classroom observations, portfolios of student work, and dialogue with real teachers and students, as well as a range of indicators from attendance and drop-out rates to graduation rates and post-graduation success, measures of teacher preparation and quality, surveys of parent participation and satisfaction and similar evaluations. Legitimate assessment strategies would also measure "opportunity to learn" inputs and equity of resources so that the victims of educational failure were not the only ones to face "high stakes" consequences. Moreover, while inequality in test scores is one narrow indicator of school performance, test scores also reflect other inequalities that persist in the larger society and in schools themselves.

About 12 percent of white children live in poverty, while over 30 percent of black and Latino children live in poverty. The richest 1 percent of households has more wealth than the bottom 95 percent. Students in low-income schools, on average, have thousands of dollars less spent on their education than those in wealthier schools. About 14 percent of whites don't have health insurance, but more than 20 percent of blacks and 30 percent of Latinos have no health insurance. Unemployment rates for blacks and Latinos are nearly double what they are for whites. In October 2003, the Educational Testing Service released a study on the achievement gap concluding, "The results are unambiguous. In all 14 factors, the gaps in student achievement mirror inequalities in those aspects of school, early life, and home circumstances that research has linked to achievement." Yet we do not hear NCLB's supporters demanding an end to this kind of equality. Nor do we hear the federal government saying that all crime must be eliminated in 12 years or the police will be privatized, all citizens must have good health care in 12 years or we will shut down the health care system.

Many organized groups representing parents and people of color have seen through NCLB's rhetorical promises and joined efforts to reform it. The Boston-based advocacy group FairTest has spearheaded a reform campaign that has won support from the NAACP, the Children's Defense League, and the Hispanic advocacy organization, Aspira. Parents have also been slow to embrace the transfer option, with only a small fraction of those eligible so far seeking to move to new schools. But a portion of the traditional civil rights coalition and a significant sector of popular sentiment in poor communities remain susceptible to the power of NCLB's rhetoric. Nourished by decades of school failure, which has reached desperate levels in urban and rural communities where less than half of black and Latino freshmen typically graduate from high school, some in these communities are understandably less concerned with the looming dangers of privatization than they are with finding ways to use NCLB to pressure schools to make good on their promises to serve all children well.

These attitudes were in striking evidence last summer at a conference of the National Coalition of Education Activists, a multiracial network of parents, teachers, and community activists that works to promote equity and reform in public education. NCEA's conferences are typically an exercise in cross-constituency political dialogue among people with long-term common goals and interests, but not necessarily common experience or even a common language when it comes to discussing education reform. Along with Monty Neill of FairTest, I helped organize several conference sessions on NCLB. True to NCEA form, the sessions attracted a diverse and energetic group: school board members from San Francisco wrestling with NCLB's crushing bureaucratic and financial burdens, Philadelphia teachers facing the takeover of their schools by private for-profit education management companies, Latino activists concerned about the law's erosion of bilingual education programs. The participants also included a good number of African-American parents, some from northern urban centers like Chicago and New York, others from the rural south, including Tennessee, North Carolina and Mississippi.

While few disagreed with the sharp political critique we offered of NCLB's hidden agendas and negative impact, many parents were less interested in working to expose or repeal it, than they were in finding ways to use it to put pressure on schools to improve. A Mississippi parent activist described a district where black parents historically had virtually no opportunity to question school board or administrative policies, where teacher unions were nonexistent, and where educational inequality was an unchallenged way of life. In NCLB, she saw public reporting mandates that put a focus on gaps between black and white student achievement, demands that schools respond to the these gaps effectively or face penalties, and options for parents to get access to "better schools" and tutorial services for their kids. She, and other parents who echoed her concerns, were not blind to the problems of standardized testing or the inadequacy of NCLB's proposed remedies. But for many, the central issue was how to use the pressure that NCLB put on schools to make them more effective and more responsive institutions.



BRIDGING THE GAP between educators who see NCLB as an attack and parents who see it as an opportunity is a formidable challenge. It requires finding common ground that begins with a recognition of the ways in which, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, our dual school system continues to provide a separate and unequal education to students from different racial and class backgrounds. It requires that teachers, and their unions, use their power not just to narrowly defend the system as it now exists, but to advocate for radical reform and urgent expansion of educational opportunity for all children.

To prevent the gaps between educators and parents from being filled by aggressive political campaigns to promote standards, tests, vouchers, and privatization will require effective, sustained public efforts to explain why these "remedies" hold out absolutely no hope of solving the problems of public education. Supporters of public schooling need to do a better job of showing how privatization and market reform promise to do for education what they've done for housing, health care, and other sectors of the economy: provide profit-making opportunities for a few well- financed investors and reproduce the class and racial inequalities that exist in the larger society. Finally, building a pro-education coalition requires developing a credible alternative program of reform that combines equity and accountability for all schools, that focuses on the supports needed to improve teaching and learning in classrooms, and that puts schools reform in the context of a larger national effort to promote local democratic institutions and reorder social priorities.

NCLB is the culmination of a very active conservative mobilization around schools over the past several decades. While the "wedge issues" that previously dominated the rightwing education agenda have been eclipsed by larger policy ambitions, they are still there. Using schools to promote military recruitment, school prayer, and even homophobia (a special NCLB provision guarantees the Boy Scouts access to school facilities despite its history of antigay discrimination) are all part of the toxic NCLB mix. A political attack on the independence and objectivity of scientific research is also a central part of the law's "Reading First" provisions, which misrepresent research about the teaching of reading and restrict the use of funds to certain commercial curriculums and instructional packages that favor scripted, test-driven, phonics-based approaches.

Today, federal education policy has become part of a larger political agenda that seeks to erode and privatize the public sector. Though the federal government provides only about 8 percent of school funding, the administration is using federal regulation to drive school policy in conservative directions at the state, district, and school levels. What's changed is not a new federal commitment to "leave no child behind," but the ideological commitment of some politicians to reform public education out of existence through a strategy of "test and burn." As commentator Danny Rose put it, "NCLB is not the answer to a crisis in public education. NCLB is a tool for creating crisis." Or as researcher Gerald Bracey has put it, NCLB "is a weapon of mass destruction and its target is the public schools."

The fallout from NCLB has begun to generate a growing resistance. In some places, students and parents are actively boycotting the imposition of high stakes testing. Both major teacher unions, the NEA and AFT, are looking for ways to modify the worst NCLB provisions. Advocacy groups like Rethinking Schools (www.rethinkingschools.org), FairTest (www.fairtest.org) are trying to promote alternative accountability systems and approaches to reform that engage educators and communities in collaborative school improvement. Parent-community advocacy groups like ACORN (www.acorn.org) are pressing politicians to make good on NCLB's rhetorical promises of better educational services for poor communities without gutting or privatizing the public system. Together these efforts prefigure a movement that could project a vision of a democratic school reform that truly serves both children and society as a whole, and that works to transform public education instead of destroying it. With NCLB making its noxious presence felt in a school district near you, it is a good time to find this resistance and join it.

http://www.wpunj.edu/%7Enewpol/issue38/karp38.htm

a teacher speaks out...

I happened to see this blog entry on Susan Ohanian's website ( www.susanohanian.org ) and I am so impressed by the clarity of this teacher's (following) thoughts...

Historically, teachers speaking out in our county are awarded a nightmare. From the highest level of our administration, a Social Studies teacher who wrote to the local paper about harrassment she received after expressing her opinion on school policy and questioning her freedom of speech rights, had to walk the plank out of her job. The superintendent at that time, just 2 years ago, didn't see the value of free speech, even in a Social Sudies classroom.

Other teachers who questioned school policy have quietly endured more local harrassment from their school administrators. A teacher in an over-sized classroom full of middle school students accelerated by county demands into Algebra a year earlier regardless of their individual aptitudes or abilities, which "functioned" in free-form chaos and disruption, preventing the teacher from reaching even the most ambitious and capable students in her class, was shackled to similar protocol, courtesy of the principal. Rather than assisting her in any way to manage the nightmare, she was told to cope...silently! Any questions about whether or not she surrendered her teaching position at the end of the school year? Oh, and by the way, her area of expertise was Science, but, she was "recruited" to teach Math.

The message is clearly sobering: that there is absolutely no room for the teacher's perspective or opinion. For example, our county-supplied Science curriculum, comes packaged with Pacing Guides (to ensure a specific order is followed and a standard schedule of testing and course work is dispensed)and a Script. Actually, this is the standard for almost all of the classes now-- the pacing guides and scripts are delivered in neatly packaged boxes at the beginning of the year.

In Science, the guides and scripts are so universally flawed that the teachers have repeatedly complained to the Curriculum Office who has responded that they are revising them. But, and in the meantime the teachers are told to continue to use them in the flawed form, even if the guides ignore a rational order for teaching and learning, and even though the tests are flawed.

The same goes for Math. Teachers are unable to make sense of tests that they are asked to dispense. What is their choice but to provide the students with "correct" answers, even if they are nonsense, when the student outcome on the flawed tests will provide results that will become part of a teacher's performance evaluation and represent the overall "progress" of the school.

In Foriegn Language, as in Science, if the teacher is unable to make supersonic progress through the pacing guide, and material is left uncovered by the time a "benchmark" test is demanded, the teacher is, likewise, "forced" to cover those weeks of material in the few days prior to the test. This is handled, not surprisingly, by supplying the students with the questions and answers from that portion of the test yet un-covered. There is no clearer example, is there, of "teaching to the test."

What does this do to the teachers? It embarrases them, certainly. They are living a nightmare of personal and professional dishonesty and unethical behavior, which is not invisable to their students, and they are being asked to sacrifice their own ethics in front of students whose respect they also sacrifice.

What does it do to the students? They, at best, learn the answers to questions and supply statistical measurments of "progress" or "proficiency" BUT, don't believe for a moment that the process doesn't effect them. First, they lose the educational benefit of learning the material. And, second, they learn the moral and ethical lesson of the charade; the lesson of dishonesty.

The AP classes endure the very same indignities of this teacher's special ed. classes. NCLB policy dictates that even students who have no foundation, nor aptitude, nor interest or ability to take a given AP class, should enroll because of (poorly supported causal) "statistical" evidence of their future performance in college. The AP classes, taught by teachers of varied interest and preparation, to students of diverse potential and ability, promotes the same corrupted results.

AP Courses once developed to challange the advanced student are staged to provide a diversity of students with a successful test-outcome. And if the outcome does not deliver results that meet the demands of the federal marketing campaign of "progress," reporters who make their living selling books and writing papers that support this ridiculous theory of "opportunity" or "quality" education for all students, inherit another royalty check for re-writing the premise. The NCLB marketing directors, in turn, make a minor change and low and behold, it is NOT the TEST that counts, in this case, it is simply the EXPERIENCE of having taken this testoutcome-based class.

The students who take these classes see right through to the fact that they are being used. And the teachers are, once again, mortified.

As I read the words of this teacher, I am struck by the obvious, ridiculous, destructive policies of a school who demands this:

"I gave the test to my English 9 special education students, the same test the honors classes took."

and this:

"I’m afraid I can’t “teach to the test” well enough for them to earn a high school diploma."

And I am rattled by the destructive forces of our federal "educational" policy which produces this:

"I passed the Social Studies content Praxis test before I entered the classroom. But I still didn’t know much specific information about World Civilization or US History – I learned the content along with the students as I began to teach it. I know teachers who have been in the classroom for several years, who are considered among the best in our school, who know the material, but have not yet passed their Praxis exams so are in danger of losing their jobs. Am I a better teacher because I am a better test taker?"

I am encouraged by this teacher's voice and her honesty.

I am afraid that if we wait for the parents to find the time to understand what is happening in our schools, if we wait for something, somehow, a miracle, a voice, a light, a new administration to step in, we will have waited in vain. We could wait a long, long time and still the momentum of this law will grow. We might wait and wait for Godot while our students and teachers are systematically sacrificed by a growing policy of destruction.

I applaud your energy and your integrity, Ms. Denney.

Lets raise some hell!






By Hanne Denney

Hanne Denney, a 47-year-old “career-changer,” is in her second year as a special education and social studies teacher at Arundel High School in Gambrills, Maryland. Hanne entered teaching through an alternative-certification program. In her previous life, she operated her own child-care center. In this blog, she’ll reflect on the challenges and rewards of starting over in teaching.

January 29, 2006

Teaching and Testing

I have tested and been tested. Last week was final exam week for the first semester, and I tested over 100 students in four different subjects. Some of the exams were specific to my students, meaning I wrote the exams. Other exams were taken by all students taking that class, with some modifications for level of ability. One test, the English 9 Assessment, was given to all ninth graders in our county. It’s that last one that troubles me. You could say I’m “testy” about it.

This assessment is a “benchmark” exam, designed to monitor the progress of our students as they move towards taking the state-mandated high school assessment in English 10. They must take and pass that exam in order to graduate from high school, along with Biology, Government, and Algebra. It’s a policy of one size test to fit all size students. I think it’s the way it is in most school districts now.

I gave the test to my English 9 special education students, the same test the honors classes took. I prepared the test on the computer system for the students who can’t read. Of course, the day of the exam, the system didn’t work and I read the exam aloud to two students. I read it to them, but I couldn’t explain it or help with answers, of course. Reading the exams to the two students meant I could closely watch their effort. I could see what confused them, which words they asked me to repeat, and which answers they put down first and then erased. I could see the pressure in their eyes and the tension in their hands. I could see how hard they worked. None of my students did well on the test, but most tried very hard. They have to keep trying, because they must pass it next year in order to earn a diploma. I’m afraid for them. It’s not just that they can’t read, but that they struggle with in-depth comprehension and analysis. I don’t know if I can teach them what they need to be successful. I’m afraid I can’t “teach to the test” well enough for them to earn a high school diploma. But I am going to try hard again this semester.

I myself have taken a lot of standardized tests. I have earned my “highly qualified” status in English, Social Studies, and Special Education through success on the Praxis exams. I passed the Social Studies content Praxis test before I entered the classroom. But I still didn’t know much specific information about World Civilization or US History – I learned the content along with the students as I began to teach it. I know teachers who have been in the classroom for several years, who are considered among the best in our school, who know the material, but have not yet passed their Praxis exams so are in danger of losing their jobs. Am I a better teacher because I am a better test taker?

Are my students poorer students because they are poor test takers?

Do we judge student success only by their scores on eight hours’ worth of exams? If you can’t pass these four exams, you can’t have a diploma. I was judged worthy of teacher status because I passed ten hours’ worth of tests. The best part is this – if I pass any other Praxis exams, I’ll be certified to teach that subject. I’ve taken five and passed, so I’m thinking about Biology, and Art. Those are subjects I like, too. Perhaps Early Childhood – that’s my previous career. I think I could even pass Algebra, definitely not Geometry. These passing scores don’t mean I could teach these subjects. Do they? How can we really measure the potential ability of a teacher?

This is the critical test for education today. Do we keep using standardized tests that measure knowledge in relation to 60 questions to judge our teachers? Do we keep testing students with unit tests and semester exams and benchmark assessments and exam-dependent diplomas? Is that how we will determine success?

Or can we consider other ways of measuring progress, and ability, and worth? For students and teachers? A lot of questions.

Sorry to test you like that.
— Hanne Denney
Teacher Magazine blog
2006-01-29

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/hdenney/

tabulating my responses...

So far, and oddly enough, I haven't heard from the Post, from Beacon Press or Heinemann, from the Legislative Education committee, or my own county BOE.

The upside is: I can still do my own statistical analysis...