In my former life as a ne’er-do-well (during my 20’s when I had a variety of jobs) I worked on a couple of small fishing boats off the Oregon coast. We fished mostly within 50 miles of the beach, far enough out to lose sight of land, and I was grateful for the navigational equipment we had on board whenever it got dark or the weather was snotty.
We had radar and radios to keep us from running into other boats, and we had LORAN (a WWII radio technology, pre-GPS) to tell us exactly where we were. There were also buoys to show us the channel into the harbor. Some of the buoys had bells or horns on them. There were lighthouses, and we had marine charts, too. This stuff was reassuring. And the fact that we had multiple ways of knowing where we were, telling other people where we were, knowing where other people were, knowing where we wanted to be and where we didn’t want to be was important. We used all this stuff to help us find fish, too, which for fishermen is maybe as important as getting back to the docks.
So I wonder, since I have such warm feelings toward this navigational equipment, why do I dislike and distrust standardized testing and “data-driven decision-making” as I do? After all, testing does pretty much the same thing. It tells us where we are relative to fixed landmarks, and it lets other people know where we are. It helps us to see and be seen. Eduwonkette blogged about the significance of research statistics recently, and plans to say a little more about data-driven decisions later this week, which is how I happen to be thinking about this now.
One important thing to remember about all the navigational aids – someone still stands watch. There’s never a time when we’d just set the autopilot and all take a nap. If you see something, or hear something that shouldn’t be there, you might also need to DO something. And there’s a lot of stuff that radios and buoys and blinking lights can’t tell you. Fog, clouds, wind, the height and direction the seas are running, drift logs, the sound of the engine – all the messy details require human awareness, and most importantly, knowledgeable judgment to respond correctly.
It’s no different in the classroom. But in the classroom, standardized testing with high stakes attached to results privileges one kind of data over every other kind. Instead of using multiple ways of seeing, and being seen, as we do on a fishing vessel, we’re being encouraged to pay close attention to only one – the test with teeth – in school. Observational data and other forms of authentic assessment get little respect from pundits and policymakers, but those are the very things that teachers need for making decisions. High stakes tests lead us off course because they are not sensitive to local conditions, the contexts for learning. Sandra Mathison and E. Wayne Ross point out that that there are unintended consequences for high-stakes accountability schemes. And they outline four basic accountability principles:
- Improvement. Use of a wider range of strategies to improve the quality of schools and learning, such as professional development.
- Equity. Closing the race, ethnicity, and class achievement gaps and overcoming the consequences of poverty and racism, through the provision of health and social welfare care as well as academic care.
- Democracy. Control over and responsibility for schools must be grounded in sound principles of participatory democracy, such as informed involvement of local stakeholders.
- Informing the public. Providing accurate information about the functioning, successes, and problems of public education, such as information about libraries, health care, availability of enough and current textbooks, clean and equipped bathrooms, and so on.
Authentic accountability is characterized by:
- local authentic assessments.
- school quality review model.
- low-stakes standardized testing in literacy and numeracy.
- annual local reporting by schools to their communities.
- consequences at the school level, not the child or teacher level, for failure.
The art of teaching is in learning how to interpret and use contextualized data.
For a long time I thought that the weaknesses of standardized tests were embedded in their design. But I see now, thanks to a link from Susan Ohanian, that the testing industry gets it wrong on the test-scoring end of the game, as well. Read about the Tests that Fail to see what kind of incompetence is behind how they’re handled after all the bubbles have been fully and carefully marked. David Glovin and David Evans won a reporting award for their story. The testing industry, as Glovin and Evans show, isn’t accountable to anyone.
Test scores mean little to me. They’re like the oil light on the dashboard of my old truck – broken, and not to be trusted.
5 Comments
I found this post to be reassuring and thought-provoking (not two things that go together easily). I’m especially a fan of the final paragraph. Great analogy.
In my visceral negative reaction to the way high stakes testing changes educators’ approaches and our schools, I have missed something. Thanks for helping me think about this a little differently. There is a place for standardized testing – one piece of the puzzle or one chart on the navigator’s table on your boat.
I think there may be something political going on here also though. Relying on the teachers and local school people to be at the helm of their classes and reading their students’ educational contexts in all their complexity puts power in the local level. Allowing students to have a say in how they show their abilities and achievements gives power to students as arbiters of value and gives them agency in their own destinies.
But when the “state” evaluates in one narrow way, well, then -they- are the ones to grant value. And then they get to be in control.
So I think “no child left behind” could more accurately be called “the elite will determine who is left behind – and guess what? they will leave everybody but their own behind”.
Or am I wrong and NCLB really has helped a bunch of destitute poor kids catch up with the rich kids in the gated communities? Well I hope so but I am dubious…
The use of the tests to “motivate” people into compliance, or somehow to do a better job is what stinks. And I agree, Matt, it’s about control and determinations of value. If we made our own choices locally about what the test results mean, and how to respond, they’d be just another source of information. As they should be.
This one took me flying through a memory flashback- last year my principal was talking with two prospective student teachers who were visiting the school before starting their final practicum. The principal, giving the tour and expounding on what she saw as the highlights of “her” staff, commented that she especially found it reassuring that she could walk into every classroom and find teachers effectively teaching material/concepts in such a way that she *knew* would make all of the students in “her” school pass the state assessments. Doe-eyed nods of agreement came from the teacher-wanna-be’s.
Must be the cynic in me, because hearing the first part of her statement made me think “wow, what a sales pitch” instead of generating pride in working with colleagues who did good jobs (of course, I’d also had the chance to walk into some of the other classrooms and personally disagreed with the equation Silence=Education). And the second part of her statement sealed the deal that I would indeed, be glad that Uncle Sam was going to move us not too many months later. I know of one principal who finds her job, mandating mastery of the test, to be oh so much easier if her staff has blinders on, or is only clued in to that faulty oil light.
The cruel joke? The school districts here in the BorderTown function exactly the same way. We should find out our new duty assignment by next week. Wish us luck- I feel the need to teach, and I feel the need to be with other thinkers. There’s a time I would have said “…be with other teachers.”
Kids from Texas who’ve ended up in my classroom during the past few years have lots to say about test preparation. They’re seasoned veterans of the process, but interestingly, they’re not necessarily any better at writing, reading, or problem solving than the rest of my students. If test preparation only helped kids do better on tests, you’d at least expect kids with lots of test-taking training to do better on them. But even that hasn’t been the case. What a waste!
And, Michaele, your story points out how the discourse has shifted. New teachers are told by principals that standardized test scores are more important than the kids. I do wish you luck with your new assignment.
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