Other questions begged in the argument for educational standards: how are standards set and enforced? People are constantly surprised when I tell them that standards in education mean high-stakes testing, which begs a whole series of questions about standardized tests like MCAS.
Educational Beggars: Students, Standards & Unasked Questions
Along with standards and accountability comes paperwork. See the New York Times article below.
And the biggest beggar of all: does imposing standards actually improve learning? Paradoxically, the quest for higher standards may be leading to a poor quality education for many students. Inner cities, bastions of bureaucracy held “accountable” by state education requirements and the federal No Child Left Behind, are most likely to face a worse education. While their counterparts in the suburbs receive educations rich in critical thinking and variety, inner city kids often face hour after hour of test preparation. In the quest for higher standards, the achievement gap widens.
One of my colleagues told me that her husband’s school year in Springfield had ended in May with the MCAS test. After that, the students were taking a battery of tests created by a testing company. I don’t know if they were field-testing it or what, but I think the school system received money for their students’ learning time. While our East Longmeadow kids continued learning, his students lost at least a month’s worth of learning do to testing. This problem, according to the NYT, isn’t limited to Springfield:
Allison Rabenau celebrated an inauspicious milestone on the otherwise unremarkable day of Oct. 18, 2004. Six weeks into her first year as a teacher, she finally taught a class.
In a perfect, if dispiriting bit of symmetry, her initial year at Public School 123 in Harlem ended the same way it began. Ms. Rabenau lost the last six weeks of the spring term to prepare, administer, then score a standardized test for English fluency.
Teachers in such schools were responsible for completing more than a dozen different forms, evaluations, assessments and reports that came variously from the levels of district, city, state and federal government, and grading standardized tests.
Teachers like Ms. Rabenau were also repeatedly conscripted within their schools to substitute for absent colleagues, to proctor exams in other classes and to chaperon field trips.
–Mb
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is not going to begin to mitigate the issues we see in today’s public school classrooms. There’s always the newest test, the newest curriculum, the newest methogology, but you know what? A teacher’s relationship with a kid sharing material cannot be commodified.
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As part of my teaching load, I teach one class each year of what we refer to as foundations-level instruction. In your typical high school, core is divided into 3 levels; I teach one high, two middle, and one low. In my foundations English class, which are, thankfully, small (< 10 students generally), I have an opportunity to understand where the kids are going and what they need. They’re upperclassmen–they’re outta here in 1 or 2 years. Usually half of these kids are on plans, half just cognitively low. Can they pass MCAS? Generally, if they try. Does this change my instruction? No. Either you can write a cogent paragraph (or two) or you can’t. Either you can read (or listen) for content or you can’t. Is the test easier the 6th time you take it? Yes. But is that kid proud s/he finally did it? Yes. (sigh)
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Sorry for the rambling virtually off-topic comment, but as a teacher on summer vacation, I think about work every single day. I dream about school now that I’m not there. I plan for what I’m going to do when school starts and what, more importantly, what I’ll do differently.
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That said, I have mixed feelings on the whole testing thing–and I teach a skill-based (vs. a content-based) subject. Do I worry that I have colleagues who don’t know their subject as well as they should? Yes. Do I worry that we’re teaching children to write like auto mechanics (no offense)? Yes. Whatever happened to teaching English Literature for the love of words, for the challenge of a close reading, for the application of the skills that we bring to reading that we should also be bringing to every other Text we encounter? As citizens, we encounter Text 24/7.
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I fear we really are–after years of hysteria–turning children into widgets. And that is a recipe, in the long run, for failure.
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/end summer vacation rant
Few sane people apply metrics to their marriage. We don’t take statistics on our cat, administer tests on manners to our children, or count observed behaviors of our friends.
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Don’t metrics always imply distance? Don’t they presuppose a lack of intimacy? Statistics, I think, are most useful when the standard deviation is not too big, where the mean or the median means something, where one is not afloat in a sea of special cases. Schools, though, are crammed with special cases.
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As a society, it’s as if we want our schools to do well but we don’t want to become intimate with them. So we hold them at a distance — with a yardstick as it were. Maybe this is what happens in a society where leisure time is scarce, where everyone has a television set on, and where patience for meetings is as rare as an appreciation for Marcel Proust.
Don’t metrics always imply distance?
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“Metrics” implies measurement. Quantification. The amount of electric charge. The strength of an electrical and/or magnetic field. The number of atoms and/or molecules in a sample. There are other examples.
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In relativity, a metric tensor is even used to tell you how to interpret distance. It isn’t as obvious as you might believe.
Don’t metrics always imply distance?
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Granted, shorn of context, the above is false. Were this a text on topology, it would be true. However, in this context, you might choose to think about what I was trying to communicate, though, rather than pick stuff apart literally.