-By Jaime Willis
Good morning and welcome to my very first Education "in the news" blog post. Once a week, I'll be choosing an education-themed story from the headlines and commenting on it from an Energy Leadership perspective. I hope that you enjoy these commentaries and would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Testing is probably the biggest hot-button item in Education today. If you want to get a group of educators riled up, ask them about testing in schools and watch how quickly the gloves come off. Although testing has been around for decades, the most recent emphasis on testing is likely a result of former President Bush's push to improve education through the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.
This law required all schools that receive federal funding to begin testing students on reading, math and science using state-chosen standardized tests throughout their academic career. Schools are then graded on how many of their children scored "proficient" or better on the test. From 2001 - 2015, the number of students in the school that need to score "proficient" rises until in 2015, 100% of students in schools across the country should, according to the law, be reading and doing math on grade level.
Ten years later, how has testing impacted students and schools? Are we getting the results we hoped for?
It completely makes sense that when schools -- administrators, teachers, and students -- are faced with what they believe to be insurmountable odds, they become desperate to save face in any way they can, resulting in a culture of cheating instead of the intended culture of academic excellence.
It is also understandable that teachers and administrators believe that it is the testing itself and being "obsessed with data" that is the problem with education today, and are rallying to reduce the nation's current preoccupation with testing as the end-all method of student performance evaluation.
The response from other school districts doesn't seem to be to get rid of testing but to "crack down" on testing security, in order to eliminate avenues for cheating.
So what is the "right" answer?
Testing isn't binary -- administrators and teachers don't have to believe in testing 100% or be adamantly opposed to it. We can do both. (For those of you keeping score at home, this is Level 5 -- finding the opportunity in everything!)
First, I agree that standardized testing is probably not the best holistic measure of student achievement. The work policy analysts, researches, and school reformers are doing to experiment on better methods of measuring academic achievement is great work and I'd like to see more of it happening. Big thinking usually results in great innovations.
On the other hand, testing is what we, as educators, are currently mandated to do. Just because testing isn't the best solution doesn't mean we can scrap it immediately and start over -- sometimes we have to learn to operate effectively in less-than-ideal scenarios.
Glennon Melton, co-author of Test Talk: Integrating Test Preparation into Reading Workshop, illustrates the both/and testing strategy best:
What are other ways for us to "Level 5" our testing strategies in schools?
Good morning and welcome to my very first Education "in the news" blog post. Once a week, I'll be choosing an education-themed story from the headlines and commenting on it from an Energy Leadership perspective. I hope that you enjoy these commentaries and would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Testing is probably the biggest hot-button item in Education today. If you want to get a group of educators riled up, ask them about testing in schools and watch how quickly the gloves come off. Although testing has been around for decades, the most recent emphasis on testing is likely a result of former President Bush's push to improve education through the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.
This law required all schools that receive federal funding to begin testing students on reading, math and science using state-chosen standardized tests throughout their academic career. Schools are then graded on how many of their children scored "proficient" or better on the test. From 2001 - 2015, the number of students in the school that need to score "proficient" rises until in 2015, 100% of students in schools across the country should, according to the law, be reading and doing math on grade level.
Ten years later, how has testing impacted students and schools? Are we getting the results we hoped for?
By Ben Mayer & Jaye Watson, WXIA-TV, Atlanta
Excerpted from www.usatoday.com
It has been a long 10 months for Mike Bowers and Bob Wilson, the special investigators who oversaw the scathing report on Atlanta Public Schools.
The two conducted 2,100 interviews and examined 800,000 documents as part of their investigation of the 48,000 student district, finding a "heartbreaking" culture of corruption.
Their 800-page report revealed that officials at nearly 80 percent of 56 elementary and middle schools examined cheated on the annual student-performance tests. There were 178 teachers and principals implicated in the cheating scandal.
...In hours and hours of testimony the impetuses to cheat were the same: nearly impossible targets, job security, fear of public humiliation, and to a lesser extent, money.
Wilson blamed [Former Superintendent Beverly] Hall's targets, a program, he said, was designed to increase accountability for a leader he said was obsessed with data. Teachers, who thought their students could not pass on their own, felt the pressure to cheat and resorted to desperate measures, and created classes of failing students who feel upwards. But as Hall's targets were met, the benchmarks only rose. And, Wilson argues, the depth of the cheating grew with it.
It completely makes sense that when schools -- administrators, teachers, and students -- are faced with what they believe to be insurmountable odds, they become desperate to save face in any way they can, resulting in a culture of cheating instead of the intended culture of academic excellence.
It is also understandable that teachers and administrators believe that it is the testing itself and being "obsessed with data" that is the problem with education today, and are rallying to reduce the nation's current preoccupation with testing as the end-all method of student performance evaluation.
The response from other school districts doesn't seem to be to get rid of testing but to "crack down" on testing security, in order to eliminate avenues for cheating.
So what is the "right" answer?
Testing isn't binary -- administrators and teachers don't have to believe in testing 100% or be adamantly opposed to it. We can do both. (For those of you keeping score at home, this is Level 5 -- finding the opportunity in everything!)
First, I agree that standardized testing is probably not the best holistic measure of student achievement. The work policy analysts, researches, and school reformers are doing to experiment on better methods of measuring academic achievement is great work and I'd like to see more of it happening. Big thinking usually results in great innovations.
On the other hand, testing is what we, as educators, are currently mandated to do. Just because testing isn't the best solution doesn't mean we can scrap it immediately and start over -- sometimes we have to learn to operate effectively in less-than-ideal scenarios.
Glennon Melton, co-author of Test Talk: Integrating Test Preparation into Reading Workshop, illustrates the both/and testing strategy best:
“You are EDUCATORS. You KNOW how flawed these tests are. Why are you working WITH THESE HORRIBLE TESTS? Why aren’t you fighting AGAINST these tests that you know aren’t good for children?”
And we’d shrug and say: You’re right. We agree with you. But the thing is that we have these students in front of us. And we owe them. They are our job. THEM, not the law changing. We can’t march on Washington because we are in the classroom preparing our students. So maybe we could work together. Maybe YOU could march on Washington and meet with the lawmakers while we teach.
Maybe this problem is so big that it takes both kinds of people. People at the capital working on the big ideas and the political structures and THE MAN while we stay on the ground and make sure THESE LITTLE LOVIES don’t fall through the cracks while change is happening. We won’t sacrifice a single one of them. Each one of them is worth more to us than the big ideas. That’s just the way we are, we teachers. We’re short sighted that way.
What are other ways for us to "Level 5" our testing strategies in schools?
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