This morning’s LA Times article about Arne Duncan’s (US secretary of education) visit to California was disturbing. For several reasons: the first because Duncan said that California is a disaster (agreed), the second because regardless of his opinion very little will change (voters shot down measures that could have allocated money to schools), and the third for this series of quotes:
Duncan said that although stopping teacher layoffs and reducing class sizes are important, the money must also be used to drive reform, such as using student achievement data to evaluate teacher effectiveness and turning around the most troubled schools.
“Investing in the status quo is not going to move the ball down the field,” Duncan told hundreds of people at a San Francisco School Alliance benefit luncheon.
He also said the state’s reluctance to use student achievement data to evaluate teachers — rewarding the best and getting rid of the worst — was “mind-boggling.”
“The data doesn’t tell the whole truth, but the data doesn’t lie,” he said. “This firewall between students and teachers is bad for children and bad for education.”
Let me get this as straight as I can: Duncan seems to think that although cutting teacher’s positions (in LAUSD 3,000 teachers have received pink slips alone) is bad…. it is WORSE that we are not using test scores to evaluate teacher performance.
Crickets chirping…..
In what universe does it make sense that a child could score well on a test if he or she is sitting in a severely overcrowded classroom? I have seen middle school classrooms with 40 students in them… what happens when 3,000 teachers lose their jobs?
Ok, let’s talk achievement scores and teacher quality. Primarily, this line of reasoning is based on flawed thinking that the tests themselves are adequate assessment of what a child knows. As educational research and teacher anecdotal evidence consistently demonstrates, these standardized assessments are poorly designed and often test a child’s ability TO TAKE A TEST. Rarely do they assess the following: intellectual curiosity, the ability to make a logical argument, an ability to explain how you know what you know, the ability to write creatively and use varied vocabulary, artistic and musical talent, bilingualism, physical fitness and health awareness, an understanding of ethics, the interpersonal skills to work effectively in groups or manage people, a deep understanding of histories, cause and effect and multiple perspectives on the same event, or a familiarity with a breadth of world literature, how to conduct a scientific observation and collect useful data, or how to apply mathematical skills to an engineering problem.
What they DO assess are: ability to effectively eliminate two wrong answers so that you can guess which of the remaining two are the right answer, how to pick out details from a supplied paragraph, and how to sit still for an hour and a half and hold a pencil.
Ok, perhaps I exaggerate, but as a former teacher, teacher educator, assessment designer, and school testing coordinator, I gotta tell ya…. not much!
WHY are K-12 standardized tests so poorly designed? Well, money of course. It is much easier to design an assessment that you can feed through a bubble machine and calculate the percentage of right answers than it is to pay professional educators to read and evaluate essays, watch student presentations, sift through portfolios, or evaluate group dynamics. We leave that kind of assessment to sophisticated fields like architecture, or business.
But Christine, you say, if the tests are so lame, why can’t the kids pass them? Because they have taken over education… literally, months of schooling are devoted to drilling and killing multiple choice strategies to students. Because they are boring and killing kids’ brains. Because education has become a watered down version of a factory line up and nobody’s brain grows in that kind of environment. Because are kids aren’t learning, aren’t developing, aren’t growing and certainly aren’t being prepared to be competitive in the global economy with new, important training in areas like language and group dynamics, but are instead sitting in overcrowded, hectic classrooms with tired teachers who are on the verge of losing their jobs.
The drop out rate in LAUSD is around the 25% mark. With a number that high, are we really still thinking that it is the KIDS’ faults that they don’t want to be in school?
Mr. Duncan, please. Do not tie teachers’ “quality” to how well their students score on bad tests. Don’t patronize us by saying that losing teachers is bad, but scoring poorly on a standardized test is worse. The answer here, folks, isn’t to try to rachet up that factory line up to get kids to pass bad tests… let’s try something else.
If you want to know how teachers are doing… give them a chance to succeed. Give them 25 kids in a room, all the resources they need, decent and effective professional development, and assessments that truly measure multiple forms of intelligence, global preparedness, and intellectual growth. Look at schools that are high functioning… look at tony elite east coast prep schools, funky do-it-yourself mountain schools, university lab schools, and progressive urban schools…. check out how they “test” their kids. Glean some ideas. Then, FUND those ideas and give teachers and students a chance to get excited about learning again.
