standardized testing

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Showing Up

Woody Allen is credited with the statement “80 per cent of success is showing up.” If you teach public school or engage in voter registration, you get this. Your job is to get the unwilling to be minimally willing and move on from there. If the students or voters don’t “show up,” your work is futile.

Public schooling and voting for public officials are considered the great institutions of American society. Both have fallen into disrepute because of modern inventions that confound them, standardized testing and voter suppression laws.  Both regulations rationalize against “showing up,” but rather that you must show up at the right time and meet certain qualifications. Those who advocate for such regulation believe that the processes of learning and voting need strict quality controls. As much as this makes sense, the regulations of standardized testing and voter id/ voting hours are not affecting quality, but participation.

If you are not directly involved in teaching or voter registration you may not understand that both learning and voting require engagement. Without it the rest of the process is defunct. It’s like another popular American institution, the lottery. If you don’t play, how can you win? As one who never plays the lottery, I can attest my interest in numbers chosen on TV or in the newspaper is nil. I am a nonparticipant.  I don’t even get why people throw their money away on such things.  Supposed you believed this about education or voting?  You don’t show up.

I have taught high school and listened to people explain what they vote for, and I know that people do not always show up for the right reasons. I know that there were days when I breathed a sigh of relief when Barry or Linda did not show up for class. But then Barry or Linda show up a week later and say, “What did I miss?” I’m thinking: a week of education. I’m wishing they had been there to know what was going on even if they didn’t do it.

You can say I’m suffering from low expectations, but I also know that these students can suddenly become engaged with the novel we’re reading for no particular reason and take off. Or someone will get through to them, and they will see the point of learning. And I think the same is true of voter registration.

I suspect those who disdain the “showing up” philosophy are thinking, No one begged me to show up, I just did. And why can’t everyone else do what I did? Take initiative, accept responsibility, do what’s right. But if you teach public school or attempt to get the vote out, you can see how thin the margin is between doing what’s right and doing nothing.  There is a redemptive moment in many lives that happens just because they showed up.

And if you want to get down to redemption, you have to believe, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”  If you don’t accept that grace or luck or connections have something to do with success, then you probably don’t believe in “showing up.”  You probably think it all comes of trying harder and having the right attitude. Good luck with that.

For my part, I begin this day asking for mercy not to screw up, and God takes it from there. And I will screw up, but I know that God will remember I showed up that morning. I will learn something, and I will remember to vote.

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Possessed

The announcement of racketeering and conspiracy charges against the former Superintendent of the Atlanta Public Schools and thirty-five of her principals  and teachers demonstrates the power of the demon “success -through-testing” and the willingness of the business community to accept superficial and suspect evidence to defend their educational agenda.

While no one has yet been convicted of these charges, and they should not be used to indict urban educators in general, the preponderance of the evidence and the complicity of the Atlanta business community in this scandal should be an admonition to those who have allowed standardized testing to possess the wills of school administrators and teachers.

“Live by the test, die by the test” was the spirit in Atlanta and both school administrators and the business community staked their reputations on a lie: the falsification of answers on the lowest-scoring tests by surreptitious erasing and re-writing of multiple choice responses.  Not only did the conspirators defraud the state assessment program by institutionalizing cheating, they directly harmed the weakest students by depriving them of state assistance for remediation. As reported in the New York Times (March 30, 2013)

The falsified test scores were so high that Parks Middle School was no longer classified as a school in need of improvement and, as a result, lost $750,000 in state and federal aid, according to investigators. The money could have been used to give struggling children academic support. Stacey Johnson, a Parks teacher, told investigators that she had students in her class who had scored proficient on state tests in previous years but were actually reading on the first grade level. Cheating masked the deficiencies and skewed the diagnosis.

Very likely educators who comply with testing fraud or teaching-to-the test never expect to harm students, because that is their bottom line: do no harm to students.  Here is specific evidence of harm, and this isolated example reflects the malignancy of the testing demon.  When raising test scores becomes the ultimate end of education, the lowest performers in the classroom are most harmed.  They learn only what is believed to be on the test and any positive results on their test scores masks the deficiencies they have brought to the classroom, because no one cares about anything except the raising of scores.  Instead of learning to read, they are learning to eliminate the likely wrong answers in a multiple choice question.

The bureaucratic mentality that asserts that quality can be evaluated by a single number is anathema to schools. The members of the business community that advocate the comprehensive evaluation of students, schools and teachers by standardized tests should consider this a wake-up call.   The role of Atlanta businesses in propping up and protecting the school superintendent, Dr. Beverly Hall, makes them complicit in the scandal.  Former Governor Sonny Perdue, who pushed back against the business community to follow-through on the investigation, is quoted in today’s Times article:

“I was dumbfounded that the business community would not want the truth,” he said. “These would be the next generation of employees, and companies would be looking at them and wondering why they had graduated and could not do simple skills. Business was insisting on accountability, but they didn’t want real accountability.”

The unshakeable belief that test scores were irrefutable evidence of quality in education distorted what were likely good intentions for improving urban education.  The extent to which prominent business owners were willing to defend these scores against the Governor himself indicates how reckless was their faith in bureaucratic reform.  Observing the adjudication of the evidence in the months to come should awaken them to the mindless demon they energized by allowing the superintendent her reign of terror on Atlanta’s teachers.

Dr. Hall was known to rule by fear. She gave principals three years to meet their testing goals. Few did; in her decade as superintendent, she replaced 90 per cent of the principals.

When an entire city is possessed by the testing demon, you have to consider the power of a culture, rather than the moral depravity of its employees.  Earnest educators lost their jobs and many nights’ sleep in the grip of the demon.  The demon had powerful allies, but mostly it had bullied victims.  It stalked the city in plain sight because its victims were silenced by those mindful of their own careers more than the welfare of Atlanta’s students.

As the case of Dr. Beverly Hall and her associates unfolds, we should recognize the power behind the scandal as well as the defendants themselves.  The mindless faith in the authority of standardized test scores possessed a city to support a demagogue and her agenda.  No regime could survive so many years without the implicit belief that rising scores were conclusive evidence of success in the public schools.  Lies can masquerade as truth only when we have given the demon power to deceive us.

 

 

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How would a journalist “race to the top”?

In “Continue the Race” (August 29, 2010) the editors of the New York Times continue to celebrate the misguided goals of the “Race to the Top,” which include evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students. This kind of assessment of teachers is wrong on so many levels: psychometry, pedagogy, social equity, and ethics.  Why do reputable journalists continue to hold teachers to standards they would never allow for themselves?

A cardinal principal of the science of mental testing, psychometry, is that a test should never be used to evaluate what it was not designed to evaluate. Therefore, a test designed to evaluate math or reading should not be used to evaluate the teacher of math or reading.  It would require an inference that could not be supported by the data.  Otherwise we might hire journalists based on their S.A.T. scores or fire copy editors for their low scores on the Millers Analogy Test. Even reliable tests can be abused and make faulty judgments.

Standardized tests are not true indicators of academic progress, especially for students who think critically or methodically.  All teachers know students who do not test well, because of the emotional pressure or because they read questions too critically or because they need time to process their thoughts.  Standardized tests privilege the quick response and the suppression of ambiguity, so that thinking is always convergent and the first answer is better than the second one.  What we consider higher order thinking, the core of our curriculum, is not assessed by standardized tests.

Perhaps journalists are accustomed to this on-demand world or even prefer it, since theirs is a world of deadlines.  Journalism is the one kind of writing with relentless and unforgiving cycles and only certain kinds of writers can adapt to them.  Yet writing in other circumstances allows the luxury of multiple drafts and time to receive feedback from other writers and editors. The same can be said of problem-solving in math, science and the social sciences.  Standardized testing does not foster these process-oriented, critical thinking skills, yet it is becoming the primary indicator of educational success.

The test performances of students in urban schools are a target of “Race to the Top.”  The conditions in urban school environments can subvert effective teaching to the extent that good teachers will run away from them.  Good teachers know they are constrained by the effectiveness of their schools.  Numerous factors are beyond their control, such as class size, flagrant absenteeism, aliterate family environments, and undiagnosed or over-diagnosed special needs.  These conditions contribute enormously to the achievement gap. Until such conditions can be reliably addressed, urban teachers and teachers of disadvantaged children should not be evaluated by their students’ performance. Otherwise good teachers will avoid the urban schools, knowing they will be penalized for teaching there.

And if  a young journalist began her career writing for a pulpy tabloid, how would that reflect on her style?  How much opportunity would a writer have to shine under the pressure to tell the most lurid story of the day?  How does the writer’s prose reflect her ability, if the text must be written at the fifth grade level? Professionals might call this “paying their dues,” but what would a similar early career performance do to a teacher, evaluated by her students’ performance?  Would anyone take into account the above-mentioned variables that undermine her good teaching?

Ultimately fairness in evaluation is a matter of ethics. You should not evaluate a job performance with the blunt instruments of standardized tests any more than you should evaluate a journalist by the word count she produces each month.  The professional standards implied by such thoughtless evaluation are unconscionable. How can we expect teachers to teach compassionately when they are assessed by tests they don’t take, with so many factors beyond their control?  They will become as disillusioned as a stringer might over time, because he never received a special assignment or appreciation for anything except meeting the deadline.

Since I am a teacher, I do not truly understand the conditions that might coarsen a young journalist, but I try to understand.  I wish for the same consideration for teachers from the editors of the New York Times.