No one outside the field of public education can truly grasp what a monster standardized testing has become. . .The standardized test - Criterion Referenced Competency Test (CRCT) in my case - is the machine driving public education today.
Oh. Superintendents won't admit it. Principals deny it. Teachers? . . .If they want to keep their jobs, teachers do what they are told - and teach to the test - making a professional and philosophic compromise with reality and ethics. For those who must compromise, instruction becomes an Alice in Wonderland world where the only reality (if it is) looms in the curious smile of the Cheshire Cat/Standardized Test..
Standardized testing does not impact teaching?
Think again.
Principals have committed suicide over their school's failure to make Annual Yearly Progress (AYP).
Superintendents bully principals over CRCT numbers.
With job security hinging on numbers and termination hanging over their heads, how can principals NOT let standardized testing dominate education? And with the trickle-down effect, how can teachers NOT let standardized testing seriously sway the way they might teach?
At the door to the school students are met by posters "179 Days Until the CRCT!" Similar posters assault them in the cafeteria, follow them along the halls. And we - as teachers - pretend that it does not interfere with their education or our teaching!
Sorry. I beg to differ.
Curriculum is designed around and coordinated with the CRCT/Standardized Test. Certain skills are taught on a certain day in a certain week. (And if good little teachers would do as they should, then since everyone is learning the same thing at the same time, hey! Why not have a robot in front of the white board? Cheaper. No health insurance. No confrontations.) At the end of each nine weeks, the Instructional Lead Teacher (ILT) gives students a CRCT-like test testing to see if teachers are teaching students to take THE TEST. In other words, test taking becomes paramount. Instead of improving and assisting teaching, the ILT becomes a bureaucrat generating, copying, pirating whatever tests she/he can find to test.
Exactly who and what is being tested in these miraculous multiple choice exams? When the principal pores and pores over the results as if magical moon dust miraculously found on the playground, what is it she is seeking? Who is she evaluating? Students? Teachers? Beyond numbers, does she really know? But I keep coming back to the question Why.
Face it. Standardized testing is about politics, about money, about numbers. As any true educator knows, teaching is about touching lives and sharing something. . .something special. True teaching cannot be quantified. But in standardized testing - in teaching to take standardized tests - numbers count. Numbers count. But somewhere in the counting, somewhere in the teaching, the students get lost, forgotten.
Looking back, I can see that this - all of this - is the reverse of art imitating reality. It is, perhaps, a fledgling effort to operate education as a business (as if teaching could truly be operated as a business).
Once upon a time, before I became an educator, I looked at my son's scores on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) and the CRCT. . .and floated on the perception that he ranked among the highest five per cent of American students. . . I should have looked and listened to the fact that from the time he left elementary school, my son was bored!
Superintendents, principals, and teachers can shout to high heaven that the standardized test is not what education is all about, but the reality that students know all too well is that only the CRCT counts. In fact, after the test in April, despite teachers best intentions, school is a kindergarten-playground broken with time for a stray lesson here and there.
Bored? That's where trouble begins. About one in four "gifted" students will drop out of school before graduating because, frankly, they are bored. They have better things to do than test taking. . .And teachers have far, far nobler things to do than test-giving.
Am I blaming standardized testing for discipline problems and failure in education? No. It is certainly a contributing factor - because of how it channels teaching, narrowing it down, making it all too often repetition rather than reflection and discovery.
There is a place and a time for standardized testing.
We all need evaluation in order to assist us in progressing. But when the evaluation becomes more important than who and what is being evaluated - the doctor more important than the patient - the time has come to stop it
I go back to the question Why.
Life is not a multiple choice test. True education is teaching life, and life goes far beyond the walls of a classroom, a school building. . .what any test can measure. How can a standardized test measure creativity? How can multiple choice questions measure individuality?
But perhaps public education is more about the whole than the individual, and it is functioning (however poorly) as, indeed, a business. Question then:
What does standardized testing say about us - our society, our system - that gives the test?