My family and I just completed a cross-country move to the Eastern Seaboard where I've just landed a new job as a special education teacher in a high-need urban high school. I have mixed feelings about this.
On the one hand, I'm happy to be back in the swing. I love working with underprivileged kids and there are fewer things more rewarding than knowing you've made a difference in the life of a young person who may have few positive influences in his life. They deserve all the support we can give them.
On the other hand, the school has been underperforming - or so say the benchmark tests - and there are all sorts of silly and pointless regulations we have to follow in the name of "accountability." Most of all, based only on the school tour and interview I had last week, I can already tell that test scores are the top priority, as established by the district higher-ups and evidenced by the scripted, canned curriculum we're apparently supposed to follow. It's this sort of crap that drives me nuts about what should be, what used to be, the most noble profession on Earth.
Still, perhaps this is an opportunity to effect change from within. How, exactly? ...I don't know. I do know this: education and test prep are each other's blood enemies.
Education creates flexible minds and psyches capable of dealing with the issues we'll face 20, 50, 80 years from now. Test prep teaches kids to bubble inside the lines.
Education provides the foundation for future learning and professional success. Test prep teaches kids that there's always, and only, one right answer to every question.
Education gives students the knowledge and confidence to ask, "why?" and "why not?" Test prep teaches you that the answer to both questions is "because I said so."
Education makes long-term research papers possible, allowing students to expand their intellectual horizons and pursue in depth a topic that interests them. Test prep is short-term, geared toward a specific exam that has no bearing on either the student's future learning or that young person's post-graduation life.
Education makes us smart. Test prep makes us stupid.
And yet, for all that, I've just signed on to help a school boost its test scores.
Like I said, I have mixed feelings about this. I know there's a lot of good I can do at this school and for the students I will have. And I'm really looking forward to meeting them.
And yet... and yet...
Our national obsession with test prep is educational malpractice, short-sighted at best, criminal at worst. The next Steve Jobs won't emerge because of it; if the creativity and passion aren't tested out of him, he'll emerge despite it. We're hobbling America's future economic standing in a pathetic attempt to appease people who call themselves reformers, who are in fact little more than hogs gorging at the taxpayer trough.
And worst of all, the testing mandate rests its corpulent backside most heavily on children in poverty. It's as if we've already given up on them, choosing to drill them in discipline and testing rather than offering the hope of a brighter future where they might actually be the ones asking questions at a job interview instead of answering them.
I worked in a high-poverty school right before we moved to our new state and the emphasis was on teaching students compliance before coursework. In some cases, this was sadly necessary but we inflicted this obedience first/teaching second philosophy on every child in the building. There was no way I'd send my kid to such a school. I'd homeschool first.
I hope this new school is different. I hope the regulations we must follow don't cross the line from onerous to asinine. I hope I actually get to teach. I'm afraid, though, that the testing mandates and scripted curriculum may get in the way of providing an education to the kids who need it most.
We shall see.
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Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Monday, August 22, 2011
We've Moved Across the Country
My wife, daughter, and I are in the midst of a cross-country move. Things happened very quickly. I'll post a more substantial update when time permits.
Thanks for sticking with me.
Thanks for sticking with me.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Cheating in Atlanta
For those of you who haven't heard the news yet, you can read about it and download all of the GBI's investigative documents here. From the NY Times piece:
This cheating scandal cut several ways.
Imagine that.
This scandal will reverberate in Atlanta for years to come. Other urban districts will take note and, in all likelihood, ramp up their anti-cheating measures. The burden, of course, will be at the school level because, in the wake of this, I suspect every teacher will now be suspected of cheating when his or her kids' test scores are high.
These idiots in Atlanta make us, the teachers, look bad. But that's nothing compared to the damage they've done to the kids themselves. I am no fan of high-stakes testing - this blog will repeatedly demonstrate my antipathy - but such tests can be a useful diagnostic tool. In Atlanta, the tests were treated as little more than a game, a system to be manipulated in any number of ways for the benefit of the adults.
Perhaps teachers and administrators contemplating gaming the system wherever they may be will take this lesson to heart. Simply put, when it comes standardized tests, you are not allowed to grease the knob before bending over.
Then there's the other side of this scandal, the side that's gotten little press: how a high-stakes testing system incentivizes precisely this sort of cheating. I'll get into that in my next post.
At the center of the cheating scandal is former Superintendent Beverly L. Hall, who was named the 2009 National Superintendent of the Year and has been considered one of the nation’s best at running large, urban districts.So what do you get when you combine pressure to goose the numbers at all costs with a culture of fear and intimidation? Apparently, you get the Atlanta Public School system.
Dr. Hall, who announced in November that she would be leaving the job at the end of June, left Tuesday for a Hawaiian vacation.
Dr. Hall is a veteran administrator of the New York and Newark public schools. She took over the Atlanta district in 1999 and enjoyed broad support. Under her administration, Atlanta schools had shown marked improvement in several areas.
Still, the investigation shows that cheating on the state-mandated Criterion-Referenced Competency Test began as early as 2001, and that “clear and significant” warnings were raised as early as December 2005. Dr. Hall’s administration punished whistle-blowers, hid or manipulated information and illegally altered documents related to the tests, the investigation found. The superintendent and her administration “emphasized test results and public praise to the exclusion of integrity and ethics,” the investigators wrote.
This cheating scandal cut several ways.
- Tests were manipulated to show improvement where the was none, allowing teachers and administrators to collect accolades and, in some cases, cash bonuses they hadn't earned.
- Parents were given a false impression of the schools to which they sent their children.
- Teachers who didn't play along or tried to blow the whistle were penalized with a variety of reprimands that could have significant negative consequences on their careers.
- Students who noticed that their tests had been altered were brushed off or told they were mistaken.
- I'm sure there's something I'm leaving out... oh, right. THE KIDS GOT SCREWED.
Imagine that.
This scandal will reverberate in Atlanta for years to come. Other urban districts will take note and, in all likelihood, ramp up their anti-cheating measures. The burden, of course, will be at the school level because, in the wake of this, I suspect every teacher will now be suspected of cheating when his or her kids' test scores are high.
These idiots in Atlanta make us, the teachers, look bad. But that's nothing compared to the damage they've done to the kids themselves. I am no fan of high-stakes testing - this blog will repeatedly demonstrate my antipathy - but such tests can be a useful diagnostic tool. In Atlanta, the tests were treated as little more than a game, a system to be manipulated in any number of ways for the benefit of the adults.
Perhaps teachers and administrators contemplating gaming the system wherever they may be will take this lesson to heart. Simply put, when it comes standardized tests, you are not allowed to grease the knob before bending over.
Then there's the other side of this scandal, the side that's gotten little press: how a high-stakes testing system incentivizes precisely this sort of cheating. I'll get into that in my next post.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Standardized Testing, Where the Grass is Always Greener
First, let me apologize for the lack of posts these past few months. I've let this project slide far too long and I'll make sure that doesn't happen again.
The argument I make in this post isn't a new one. It is, however, unalterably true.
In the 1980s, when the economic war with Japan was heating up, many American educators looked to the Japanese system with envy. Universal literacy, high achievement on international tests in virtually every subject, a well-educated workforce powering what seemed like an unstoppable economic juggernaut. And how did they do it? A national curriculum, cram schools, and an obsession with standardized testing.
The pressure was, and remains, so great that it drives teens to suicide and has led to a class of students known as "ronin," who take a year off after high school for the sole purpose of studying for the make-or-break college entrance exams.
Meanwhile, Japanese educators were looking at the United States, marveling at the enormous strides made by her research universities. As the 1990s wore on and the Japanese economic bubble burst, many Japanese educators started calling for a more American educational system, one that rewards creativity as well as achievement. The problems with the Japanese economy, they said, could be traced in part to the rigidity of the national curriculum, a rigidity that allowed no room for the next Bill Gates to pursue his passion and flourish.
Today, we're once again seeing this cycle. This time, it's the Chinese being held up as a K-12 model for Americans to follow, a model built on testing, testing, and more testing. Howard Gardner, the developer of the multiple intelligences theory (MI), once saw a carton of milk in China that advertised how it would help children boost all 8 of their intelligences. A Chinese colleague explained that, while Americans used MI to find out where a child's strengths lay, Chinese used it as a guide for the 8 areas in which their children should excel.
And, once again, we're seeing Asian educators wondering how their universities can match the academic research powerhouses in the United States.
It is ironic that so many Chinese students, and their families, see an American college education as the ticket to success. The American university system is not based on a rigid admissions process - a student can theoretically work her way from an open-admissions community college to an Ivy League medical school - and attempts to consider the "whole person" during the application process.
Standardized testing is threatening to change that. The greatness of the American educational system lies in its diversity, the creative richness of multiple talents and interests in one place, sharing and rejecting ideas, thoughts, arguments. Standardized testing, especially of the multiple-choice variety, teaches instead that (a) there is only one right answer and (b) there is always a right answer.
The world doesn't work that way. Just ask any business executive.
If the United States is to maintain its economic and scientific mantle, we must ensure that standardized remains just one aspect of our children's curriculum. Too many school districts have adopted it as the primary driver of the curriculum. This has to stop.
I will deal with the increasing standardization of the American school system in a future post. For now, I will say only that the current uses of standardized testing are stupid, bordering on criminal. Something has to be done.
The argument I make in this post isn't a new one. It is, however, unalterably true.
In the 1980s, when the economic war with Japan was heating up, many American educators looked to the Japanese system with envy. Universal literacy, high achievement on international tests in virtually every subject, a well-educated workforce powering what seemed like an unstoppable economic juggernaut. And how did they do it? A national curriculum, cram schools, and an obsession with standardized testing.
The pressure was, and remains, so great that it drives teens to suicide and has led to a class of students known as "ronin," who take a year off after high school for the sole purpose of studying for the make-or-break college entrance exams.
Meanwhile, Japanese educators were looking at the United States, marveling at the enormous strides made by her research universities. As the 1990s wore on and the Japanese economic bubble burst, many Japanese educators started calling for a more American educational system, one that rewards creativity as well as achievement. The problems with the Japanese economy, they said, could be traced in part to the rigidity of the national curriculum, a rigidity that allowed no room for the next Bill Gates to pursue his passion and flourish.
Today, we're once again seeing this cycle. This time, it's the Chinese being held up as a K-12 model for Americans to follow, a model built on testing, testing, and more testing. Howard Gardner, the developer of the multiple intelligences theory (MI), once saw a carton of milk in China that advertised how it would help children boost all 8 of their intelligences. A Chinese colleague explained that, while Americans used MI to find out where a child's strengths lay, Chinese used it as a guide for the 8 areas in which their children should excel.
And, once again, we're seeing Asian educators wondering how their universities can match the academic research powerhouses in the United States.
It is ironic that so many Chinese students, and their families, see an American college education as the ticket to success. The American university system is not based on a rigid admissions process - a student can theoretically work her way from an open-admissions community college to an Ivy League medical school - and attempts to consider the "whole person" during the application process.
Standardized testing is threatening to change that. The greatness of the American educational system lies in its diversity, the creative richness of multiple talents and interests in one place, sharing and rejecting ideas, thoughts, arguments. Standardized testing, especially of the multiple-choice variety, teaches instead that (a) there is only one right answer and (b) there is always a right answer.
The world doesn't work that way. Just ask any business executive.
If the United States is to maintain its economic and scientific mantle, we must ensure that standardized remains just one aspect of our children's curriculum. Too many school districts have adopted it as the primary driver of the curriculum. This has to stop.
I will deal with the increasing standardization of the American school system in a future post. For now, I will say only that the current uses of standardized testing are stupid, bordering on criminal. Something has to be done.
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