According to Wednesday's New York Times, the NYC DOE (New York City Department of Education) announced Tuesday that it would allocate $10 million to supporting students who fared poorly on standardized tests, but teachers from all camps agree that "teaching to the test" and "teaching" are not the same thing.
This money should not be used to buy more "teaching to the test."
The teacher of one of my children, a superb educator, once complained about being required to miss school for two days in order to grade standardized tests. Like most excellent teachers, she was reluctant to be absent from class in order to to do this work. (The taxpayers and cash-strapped DOE paid for two teachers that day.) After doing the grading, she lamented the shortcomings of the scoring procedure -- its failure, in particular, to allow for partial credit, which she believed was, in some cases, due. While reading third grade tests on third grade material she covered each year, the third grade teacher found that some incorrect multiple choice answers were more wrong than others. Not distinguishing between partially wrong and totally wrong answers, she felt, resulted in an inaccurate assessment of proficiency.
As home, I tend to de-emphasize standardized tests, but because I have wanted my children to be familiar with their formats before they sat for these tests, I have used obsolete copies of the city-wide Math and ELA (English Language Arts) examinations to help my children prepare for them.
Never have I perused the ELA tests and not found objective errors (grammar, mechanics and typos). Many classroom teachers agree that the ELA tests are often too ambiguously worded, and as a writer, poet and educator who has taught about 40 children to read, I am always struck by the extent to which children who read imaginatively are penalized in the reading comprehension portions. Furthermore, there are some fool writing strategies children must employ in order to wrangle the highest grade of 4 on the writing section. Novelist Philip Roth might have a hard time getting a 4 on the writing section of the ELA test.
Some very bright children do well on these tests, but most teachers, both those who "teach to" these tests and those who refuse (on principle) to do, agree: These standardized tests, on which so much hinges, are not very intelligently conceived. Many smart, capable children fare poorly on them; many well-trained but not so very intellectually gifted students excel on them; and many highly intelligent public school students fare just okay on them.
Predicating an evaluation of students' progress on one test per year is, under the best conditions, folly. It's a bit like basing A-Rod's batting excellence on one game a year.
As a high school English teacher -- even when I had 150 students at once -- I assigned, read, scribbled upon, and graded one formal composition at least every other week and gave lots of unannounced quizzes. At the end of the semester I'd ask my college and high school students to grade themselves. Roughly 85 percent assigned themselves the grade at which I had already arrived. The frequency of testing offered students maximum information along the way and better control, and it it helped me to know what students needed. More important, it let me know what my students did not need.
Hundreds of classroom hours and DOE dollars are wasted each day teaching children things they already know. Time, in DOE NYC schools really is money. Cut the time it takes for a child to learn a concept, and money gets saved. It is cheaper to do it right, than to do it improperly.
All three of my children were fortunate enough to have excellent public education in grades 1 through 5 NYC DOE schools. Because fifth grade is the last year of a self-contained class in DOE schools -- to be followed by transition into middle school with its switching of classes, lockers, and going out to lunch -- my children were especially lucky to have excellent fifth grade teachers.
Recently, as a result of its verification-mad, testing frenzy, the DOE has threatened to publicize the grades it has assigned to individual DOE teachers. I am all for teacher accountability, but this idea is as as silly as it is untenable. (The problems associated with grading teachers and making these grades public are so numerous as to require an essay dedicated to them alone.)
It is hard to imagine a finer teacher than my youngest daughter's fifth grade teacher. She excelled in every possible area of teaching. This educator was funny, easygoing, smart, a great writing and math teacher, a history buff who ignited my child's interest in history, a tough new York gal in love with all her students, a bit of a philosopher, creative, organized, fair, and one of the more compassionate people I have ever met.
The DOE gave her the grade of "F".
I guess it's hard to get an "A" when you're not there on the day of the test.
My daughter's fifth grade teacher was not in a classroom the year she earned the grade of "F." She was out on maternity leave that year.
This is why it is wrong to rely on "the test." These kind of mistakes are made every day in assessing the mastery and performance of NYC DOE students. The same crew who assigned my daughter's fifth grade teacher an "F" administers the test "to which" so many fine teachers, such as the aforementioned one, find themselves required "to teach."
This is what Public Advocate Bill de Blasio had to say about the $10 million. And he is right.
"But while those $10 million help, I doubt it's everything we need to do. We have to figure out exactly what will give these kids the leg up that they deserve."
Every DOE dime should be spent carefully. The poor should get more than the affluent, and people with special needs should get more than the rest.
New York City plans to issue disbursements to principals who will determine how best to use them. I'm not sure how I would spend this money if I were a principal, but I sure know how these DOE dollars should not be spent.
They should not be squandered on tenure whores masquerading as pedagogues. Nor on time-clock punchers, failed teachers completing "wordsearch" puzzles in DOE district office desk jobs, or naively conceived Special Education programs, which, because they don't work, are cost-ineffective.
The $10 million should not pay for flimsy band-aids on gaping, gushing arterial wounds. They should be used to stop the bleed.
Some of that $10 million ought to go to experts -- not education hacks -- but real educators, intellectuals and thinkers (maybe Philip Roth is available) who can assist in designing exciting protocols for enabling the thousands of children left behind by "No Child Left Behind" to be "free at last" to show us how intelligent they truly are.
Follow Michele Somerville on Twitter: www.twitter.com/NYpoet
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You sound like an expert at judging teachers. How do you know she's Excellent, Superb, or is she such solely because she agrees with you?
If she was such a superb educator, she'd know that the big picture is what is important. At the end of the day, does it matter what you got on your second grade english final exam? Would you be in a different spot today if your exam grade was any different?
What a GOOD standardized exam tries to accomplish is to test and gauge critical thinking ability. For example. any Physics student can solve F=ma, especially if you give them "m" and "a." But then what? What is the point? This is an example of your average Physics problem. We call it "Plug and Chug."
New York, for example, has their Regents Exam for Physics. The entire state was thrown upside-down when the Physics final pulled away from "Plug and Chug" and instead focused on questions such as "How?" and "Why?" as opposed to "What." Or they'd throw an unfamiliar problem at a student to see if they can figure out how to solve it.
So if "teaching to the test" is requiring SUPERB Educators to teach Critical Thinking skills, Problem Solving Skills, and Understanding instead of regurgitation... her students would otherwise be trained chimps... not my idea of an Excellent Teacher.
What happens 2-3 years later when they need that knowledge for another class? Or their career? Teachers would like to think that every single one of them is an expect at how to teach, but considering the very, very low bar for becoming a teacher these days... I'd wager that is probably not true.
Go into a tutoring center within any SUNY school. Talk to the students there. You'll find a stark contrast between, say, New Yorkers who were "taught to an exam" and out of state folks who were taught whatever the teachers wanted to teach, and were graded on arbitrary scales of whatever their teachers felt was important.
That comment is just sort of nit-picky mindset we're talking about. Please drop the Grammar teacher riff. Judge not lest ye be judged and all that.
I'm forever finding proofreading errors in published novels and nonfiction books and articles. And I'm no straight A student when it comes to these discussion boards.
Perhaps we humans were more careful when we wrote out our ideas with quill or fountain pens, lined through our errors and meticulously copied them over. Maybe our critical thinking and command of the English language was better--different anyway, but I'd say the technology far outweighs the disadvantages. Language won't fall apart. Language evolves.
With all due respect, it is just this kind of unnecessary diversion and distraction response that is, at least for me, beginning to grate. What purpose does it serve? We all know that we all know the basics of grammar and spelling conventions. You know you're not "baffled" at this line--and so does your audience, so why say it? Why not converse about the meat of the topic?
I'd really like to know what the motivation is for this kind of dissembling. Because it's all too common. (yes I began a sentence with because. Because. See? It gets us no-where.
Good eye!
Thanks for catching the typo.
MMS
In addition to test prep, we will also be giving the students additional tests. So much for making school fun anymore....
Sorry if that sounds cruel but it's time as a school teacher that you learn your craft by reading decades of research. BTW: Lifelong learning was a term developed in the 60s and is really overused in today's environment. I think you meant something else.
Then I got another degree from the UofA --my MLS. Now as a reference librarian (elsewhere in the West)--I can proctor tests. So, I've proctored many an AP test from a certain University (in a contiguous state) for college credit. Guess what? The Spanish Language Equivalency college credit test? You guessed it: multiple choice scantron test for Spanish. espanol. Spanish!
The comparison couldn't be more stark.
Standardized testing is a failure. Pure and simple.
You CAN NOT educate students by only using testing which involves a student from choosing a, b, c or d!!!!!!!! This assessment is NOT a good example of what the student has learned. This type of assessment is a good example of how the student GUESSES!!!
If standardized testing is so effective, why is it that if someone who wants to go into college, we don't only assess their education on their SAT scores?
Exactly. Learning and education go hand in hand. It isn't enough to just test, you have to assess how the students learn and how they do in their subjects. Standardized testing does nothing in this area. NOTHING. NADDA.
It is a joke and it is a serious hinderance to us as a society, as an American, and as a Human Being.
Yes, the SAT is a Standardized Test. A bad one.
Why don't I hear anyone railing about how the AP Calculus exam is broken? How about AP GRE's? Because they're better constructed Standardized Exams.
To which I will say that when New York State changed their Regents Physics Exam to focus around critical thinking, problem solving, and qualitative analysis students failed in record numbers, and teachers basically pushed back to make it a "Trained Chimp" test yet again.
At the end of the day, education is not about knowing what you were taught. It is about knowing what you WERE NOT taught. As in, I can teach you about subjects A, B, and C... and on the test you'll see subject D, that wasn't in the curriculum. From what they know of A, B, and C, they should be able to figure out how to solve subject D, then solve it.
THOSE are the skills students will use later in life. THOSE are the skills tested on a good standardized exam. (SATs being one of the worst.)
1) States implemented standardized testing to see if students had the skills needed to graduate high school and go off into college. They expanded this to include grammer and middle school, which is fine but is not part of what I was arguing. Now, since Standardized testing started at the high school level, it is reasonable to make the argument I made about SAT in applying to colleges.
2) I never stated that SAT was a good standardized test. I merely stated that it was an already EXISITING one. However, the point I was trying to make is that since colleges don't recruit students solely on their SAT scores, it should be also a reason why we should NOT brand teachers "good" or "bad" by standardized testing alone.
Some schools are investing in test taking computer programs that are evaluated by the companies that produce them. These products have narrative short answer sections that are "around 65% accurate" ( straight from one company when I pressed my school IT person to check out a few of my and my team mates concerns.)
So, we were using an expensive product with the equivalent of a "D" grade to prepare our students to take a test that measures literal thinking instead of critical an analytical reasoning.
And when you have hours-long tests on Wednesday and Thursday, how much hard school work can you get done on a Friday? They're exhausted and bored and desperate for a break, making the days after a test (and to a lesser extent, the days before) unavailable for normal instruction.
The tests distort and displace education. The benefits are far outweighed by the drawbacks.
In the American education industry, those in power are fixated on using tests that are easy to score (read: low-level facts that are quickly forgotten after the test) rather than measuring what is important to learn. Multiple choice tests cannot measure the higher level learning domains of reasoning and performance i.e. what you can do with what you have learned.
Moreover, those in charge of the education industry fail to recognize a basic premise of learning: Knowing is not the same as understanding. And without understanding you cannot reason nor apply what you know. Example: I know what Einstein's formula for relativity is (MC squared = E). I even know what each letter stands for (M = matter, C squared = speed of light, E = energy). But fail to understand how the formula works or how to apply it within physics. Knowing is not the same as understanding.
Assessment should always be in the service of learning, and one of the overarching goals of any assessment program should be to get students to the point where they no longer need to be told if they have succeeded, as well as be able to identify where they went wrong.
Standardized tests do not give students ownership of their own learning, and until students understand where they need to go and how to get there, we will continue with the ludicrous facade of accountability that is part and parcel of what passes for educational reform these days.