Our book doesn't really talk about testing of children, but it speaks to the symptoms of a system that led to testing-centered debacles such as President George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" and President Obama's "Race to the Top" (the latter an interesting and perhaps unintentional double entendre). Personally, I don't believe that holding teachers accountable (through standardized testing) for what they have taught children deals with the very basic problems. To warn that teachers won't be fired if their students pass academic tests, to threaten that school districts won't suffer financial consequences if their test scores meet federal standards, misses the point and causes other problems. As we comment in our book, schools have shifted away from the art of education to the business of education. Testing as the primary means of holding schools accountable is more in line with the business approach to education.
An analogy.
A business creates an inventive and high quality product: widget #1. It markets and sells the product successfully. The business owner decides that the business must make more money. Marketing is improved. The product is refined to become even better than the original. The business makes more money.
Another product similar to widget #1 is developed by another company and appears on the market. Widget #2 is for sale at a lower price. The producer of widget #1, to compete, realizes that its selling price must be lowered. This cuts into the profit margin. A price war ensues. At some point, the business selling widget #1 decides to cut down on the number of employees by laying off more experienced workers, and thus more costly workers, so that the price of widget #1 can be lowered to compete with the cost of widget #2.
The company selling widget #2 moves its factory to China where wages are a fraction of wages paid in the United States. The company producing Widget #1 determines that it can't afford to move the company to a place where wages are lower so the company begins the process of substituting plastic parts for steel parts to save money. Widget #1 sales begin to fall precipitously because not only is the price non-competitive but the quality of the product is reduced significantly. Widget #1 goes out of production. Widget #2 is succeeding but now has to compete with Widget #3 which is manufactured in India and made out of plastic. And the downward spiral of quality continues.
The analogy isn't perfectly parallel with schools systems but making the comparison is worth a try.
School system #1 hires excellent teachers. It maintains high academic standards. The students that attend the school come with an attitude that reflects that good education is a right and not a privilege and that education requires unrelenting commitment to quality education by teachers, students and student families. The teachers are not held accountable by standardized tests because there aren't any standardized tests. The individual teachers know their students very well and devise pedagogies and evaluation processes customized for their students. There is intrinsic motivation among the teachers to live up to the professional and ethical responsibility to be the best teachers possible because they believe that it is through education that our country is formed – its values. The students are interested in learning. Part of to inspiration to learn comes from the family, excellent teachers, and administrator-educators, but mostly from the students themselves and their parent(s). These kids love learning. They graduate having received an education and not just a diploma.
School system #2 replaces retiring teachers not with the best teachers with significant classroom experience but with first-year teachers. They make the decision to hire new teachers based on the cost of providing education and not on the quality of the education that is provided. The problem goes a bit deeper here because university admission standards for students interested in entering teaching as a career are typically very low across the country. Not only are the teachers in School System #2 inexperienced, but they may not have had the inclination, aptitude and talent required to be an excellent teacher in the first place.
Many teachers that have left school system #2 and teaching profession altogether before completing 5 years of teaching due to frustation. 75% of the teaching staff are first-year teachers - many of which should not have been permitted to enter the teaching field in the first place. The administration in SS#2 is comprised of people initially hired as coaches and history teachers. After a few years, these coach-teachers become school counselors, then vice principals, then principals, then curriculum directors, then vice superintendents and finally superintendents. Nearly every administrative position in SS#2 is occupied by ex-coaches. They run the school and, of course, have primary interest in the success of the athletic program.
SS#2 is structured on the business model. The students' parents of SS#2 are the consumers; the students are the customers; the faculty are the human resources; entrepreneurial curriculum building provides a curriculum the student-customers like; the high school diploma is the product. To receive the product, students must pass minimum competency tests that essentially guarantee that graduates have at least a 9th grade proficiency in the tested areas. To have their students pass these tests, the teachers "teach to the test" and forego most everything else. Their job depends on graduation rates.
The coach-administrators urge their teachers to take whatever steps are necessary to have their students pass the exams. Everything – the very existence of the school, faculty and administrative positions – depends on attaining the highest graduation rate possible. No one can fail. To accomplish this task, SS#2 teachers have not only aimed their teaching at passing the tests, but the administration has excluded scores from disabled students, students who are learning English as a second language, and disadvantaged kids. All this makes SS#2 look good to the federal government. What happens, however, to the quality of education when first year teachers that graduate from universities where the school of education is not thought of highly are put in charge of teaching students to pass tests so that SS#2 can continue receiving federal funding and teachers can be retained? Students from SS#2 will graduate with a diploma but not an education! What happens to the United States when this approach pervades our school systems. It is unbelieveably upside down.
Like the Widgets above, school districts all over the country have succumbed to quantity over quality. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Slaughterhouse 5...."and so it goes".
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