More Than a Score (15 page)

c. more bigger

d. most biggest

There were no algebra problems on the math portion and the writing section asked the only semi-pedagogical question: What new or innovative tool do you use to engage students in learning? Ugh! When I got my results, I was stunned to see that I had gotten a 98 percent on the math test. I kept wracking my brain to figure out what I could have possible missed. I think I got a 100 percent on the reading, 80 percent on the writing (because I was extremely sarcastic by that point in the test and wrote about how excited my students were to see that I used different colored dittos to make one assignment sheet). I thought this test was very easy—perhaps sixth-grade level—and had no problem with increasing the rigor of that test. But here's the thing. It did not make me feel smart. It did not make me feel as if it had accurately assessed my ability to teach and herein lies the issue with all these tests.

At the beginning of my teaching career, I saw how much emphasis was placed on standardized testing, so I wanted to be able to prepare my students for the world they were about to face. I remember being stunned when I gave the first multiple-choice test that came with the textbook. The white boys did extremely well. It was uncanny. I even had a long conversation with one kid who was doing very poorly in my class. He said he was never going to do much work and that he skated by being able to take the standardized tests. He even considered it a game as to how lazy he could get away with being, knowing the test would save his grade. One of my best students, a very bright African American girl, was devastated by her results. I spent a lot of class time going over why the wrong answers were wrong, because I thought it would help, but it didn't matter. She internalized the scores as somehow reflective of her value and potential. I knew that was garbage and immediately decided to make sure that these tests would carry no more weight for the total grade than quizzes, labs, or homework. It solidified my belief in multiple measures.

In 2002, I became a National Board Certified Teacher (NBCT). One of the reasons I did this was to finally get some sort of real evaluation of my skills. I had been rated “superior” in all my years of teaching, yet I did not have real feedback as to how I could improve. I always felt there was something missing from the “drive by” or “no by” [no administrator comes by] observations. I never had a problem with classroom management and basically felt that's how I was rated. I liked that the tests that asked for content knowledge and pedagogy were essay questions. You got to write everything you knew about a topic. In the section where you had to demonstrate your content knowledge of chemical concepts, I got a 4.25! That was the highest score possible, and it was due to the fact I got to truly demonstrate my knowledge. I also spent a couple of summers as an assessor. NBCT assessors are all experts in their fields. I was among a group of very bright, engaged chemistry teachers who were well trained and eagerly worked hard to assess properly. I am horrified that Pearson has taken over the assessment of NBCTs. I doubt it will be for the better.

When No Child Left Untested became the law of the land, a friend of mine got a job with one of the test-producing companies. They were looking for test item writers. I went through the two-day training because I thought I would a) learn to write better multiple-choice questions than the ones from the textbook; b) I would discover the key to eliminating bias; and c) I could develop a bond with a community of science lovers who would support one another and collaborate across the country. Needless to say, the bias training was not nearly as instructive or intense as it needed to be. It consisted of reminding yourself to use “she” instead of “he,” including nonwhite-sounding names like Tran, Maria, Juan, and avoiding terms and activities that could draw attention to different socioeconomic levels. Don't write about going skiing or vacationing in Europe. There was nothing about using language in a clear and straightforward manner. They even taught us the difference between “good distracters” and “bad distracters.” When I asked, “Why can't we just write questions that have one clear, correct answer?” I was told—not rigorous enough. I wrote a few questions, but the time it took ultimately was not worth the $25-a-question paycheck.

Sometime in 2009, the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) wanted to raise the cut score—the score that determines who passes and who fails—on the Basic Skills Test for students entering colleges of education. At the time I had been appointed to the Illinois State Certification Board and was fully in support. I remember the concern expressed by one of the members representing higher education who protested vigorously that doing so would lead to a significant drop in teachers of color. One of the other black teachers (who taught at a rather affluent suburban school) said that should not be a consideration because we wanted the “best” teachers. What I did not know at that time was that the Basic Skills Test had been changed significantly from when I took it. Imagine my horror when I found out a year later that ISBE was going full steam ahead with its plan. I testified against it at the General Assembly hearings, but my words fell on deaf ears. Needless to say, the pass rate dropped to 21 percent for black and Latino teaching candidates. Hovering around the process were the same people who would push through the school reform agenda that has plagued the state since then.

When I was elected president of CTU, my students were sophomores. The following year they took the ACT. My former principal could not wait to tell me how well my former students performed. He even told me two of my students had scored in the 30s. Without missing a beat, I told him who those students were. I knew one was a middle-class girl in my first-period class whose parents were going through a divorce and who barely made it to class on time, understood almost every concept without my having to explain anything to her, and who could zip through a “book” test without batting an eye. The boy in my seventh-period class, also middle-class, did the minimum amount of work but could pass each test with flying colors. I didn't feel as if I could take credit for the good, the bad, or the ugly. These tests told me about my students before I ever got to teach them.

Looking back at over fifty years of personal experience with standardized testing, I have come to the following conclusions: The tests are still extremely biased in favor of upper-middle-class white males (I'm not even sure what “middle-class” means nowadays, but it certainly isn't the working-class and poor children who overwhelmingly populate Chicago Public Schools). The use and misuse of standardized testing to measure what students know is still a farce, and that America's obsession with numbers, data, and the like will continue a practice that has so little merit is almost laughable. The more mind-numbing the curriculum becomes in order to satisfy the insatiable god of numbers, the more the children who should have joy in learning will come to hate school. And that is the worst possible outcome I could ever imagine. The members of the Chicago Teachers Union will continue to work to change the political and economic landscape that allows the devastation of public education to happen. This fight is not nearly over and it will take us standing side by side in solidarity with our students, their families, communities, and other folks who are on the educational frontlines across this country to win. A movement starts with one small step. Let's join together and take the leap.

Defending Young Children

I entered the field of education at an exciting time. It was 1972 when I started graduate school, just after the extraordinary social change and unrest of the 1960s, a time in history when many young people like me were so hopeful about the dawning of a better world. Through the Great Society's War on Poverty, families were receiving employment and welfare supports and the child poverty rate was declining. There were intensive investments in under-resourced schools as legislators took steps toward achieving their national goal: equal educational opportunity for all children. Words like
equity
,
poverty
,
segregation
, and
equal educational opportunity
filled the air—spoken by movement leaders, political leaders, and the media. It was at this time that many young people, myself included, went into education because we thought this was a career path that would allow us to help create a better, more just society.

I threw myself into my education studies, devouring readings in educational philosophy, history, and pedagogy. I learned about children—their development, how they learn, how to create classrooms to foster genuine understanding through active engagement. I was fascinated by how the dynamic interaction between children and their world was at the root of learning. It was wonderful to find a calling in life I loved this much.

Now, it's forty years later. And I am struggling to come to terms with how much things have changed in these few decades. When politicians and policy makers talk about education today, they no longer use words like
equity
,
poverty
, and
equal educational opportunity
. What we hear instead are these words:
accountability
,
evaluation
,
data
,
measurement
,
competition
,
choice
, “
race to the top
.” The direction I thought we were taking as a nation to give all children an equal chance for a great education morphed in three decades into a cold-hearted call for measuring outcomes while at the same time ignoring the inequalities that children are born into and that shape their lives.

And here I am, after decades of working as a teacher educator, looking at these education reform policies. They are not based in the research or science of the education field; they are driven by opinion or politics—by the views of people: policy makers, politicians, philanthropists, most of whom aren't in education and never were. Education reform policies, of course, should be based in the research and theory of the field; they should address the underlying inequalities in the school system such as the root causes of the achievement gap.

The focus of my work in teacher preparation has been in early childhood education. In recent years, I have watched the testing fixation and the pressure to teach academic standards pushed down to younger and younger children, even to kindergarten and pre-K, increasing the direct instruction children receive and reducing their opportunities for imaginative, engaged, and developmentally appropriate learning.

How Do Young Children Learn Best?

Young children learn actively through hands-on experiences in the real world. They need to engage in active, playful learning, to explore and question and solve real problems. As children do this, they build concepts that create the foundation for later academic success. And perhaps even more importantly, through active, play-based, experiential learning, children develop a whole range of capabilities that will contribute to success in school and life: problem-solving skills, thinking for themselves, using imagination, inventing new ideas, learning social, emotional, and self-regulation skills. None of these capabilities can be tested, but they are life-shaping attributes that are ready to develop in the early years.

There has been a consensus in the early childhood field for a long time that testing young children is not valid or reliable and often causes children undue stress. Young kids develop concepts and skills over time through a long, slow process that's often not linear and can't be quantified. The best way to assess young children's learning is through observation, done by experienced teachers who know what to look for and how to interpret children's activities and behavior. Assessments are really for teachers—to help them understand children and help them learn.