a brief twitter conversation on our testing culture...

On a Thursday night a mathematics teacher from around Vancouver was looking for sympathy on Twitter...

She said: What do you do when a student skips a math test and the parent thinks YOU are unreasonable expecting them to have been there? #bced #mathed

I looked at this, and thought a few things. I thought about the entire idea of the classroom test. I thought about a teacher picking a fight with both students and parents in the week before Christmas. And I thought about the amazing amount of potential educational time "we" in schools waste on fighting battles over compliance which do absolutely nothing to help kids either learn a subject, a skill, or learn to be successful adults.

from, F in Exams by Richard Benson

So, I jumped in... and away we went...

 

Me: does the student know the maths in question? #bced #mathed

British Columbia Maths Teacher:  the formative assessment says they know some....

Me: then, is the test important? What will it show?

British Columbia Maths Teacher:  it is summative assessment. It will show what they can do.

Me: ok, but can't she do the same thing lots of ways? Is the test format of some special value?

British Columbia Maths Teacher: yes. It is their opportunity to show me what they can do.

Me: ok, I've just never understood either the classroom test or why it would need to happen at any specific moment... I think teachers have a million ways to gather information about where their students are. And should do it continuously

British Columbia Maths Teacher: [to another in the twitter conversation] the policy is a zero [My thought, a “Zero” as a student score is actually at “minus 65,” a cruel and bizarre rating for anyone to receive]. But this entitlement to my time is frustrating. We have two weeks of holiday. I don’t work tomorrow.

British Columbia Maths Teacher: ok you sound like the father. You aren’t helping, sorry.

Me: sorry, its what I tell all the teachers I work with, around the world

British Columbia Maths Teacher: I’m sure they love that message.

Me: we are pushing back against the testing culture at every level, which creates schools which are better for kids … so we say we don't rank either students or teachers by these test scores

British Columbia Maths Teacher: we spend hours creating fair assessment for this purpose. This one took me 4 hours.

Me: tests are never equitable assessments. They create big problems for some kids

British Columbia Maths Teacher: lol now I know you have no idea. Thanks, but you don’t get it.

Me: think of all the time and energy you wasted, making the test, giving it, now fighting about it. You could have been teaching

British Columbia Maths Teacher: have a great evening. You are right, my time is important. 

from, F in Exams by Richard Benson

Then, she blocked me

I did suggest: good night, sorry you're not open to doubting your practice. Maybe some day

Perhaps I was harsh, she went onto Twitter about this not to look for a solution, not for professional development purposes, but simply to whine and find people who would tell her she was right. I didn't do that, and neither did some others, and she got frustrated and angry. That's ok. That, perhaps, is the exact same reaction she is getting from at least one of her students - as this teacher blocked me to avoid an uncomfortable conversation about her skills, so this student might have skipped this "summative assessment" for the same reasons.

But, I do ask teachers all the time, "why?" Why is this form of assessment important? Why is this assignment, project, book, test, chair, schedule, good for this student, or what this student needs? And I also ask, "is this worth the time you are investing in it?" How much of your day do you want to devote to law enforcement, or conflict, or teaching a particular form of etiquette? Are their better ways for you, and your students, to use your time?

And I often think about something an Albemarle County (Virginia) middle school teacher said to me one night, as we left a bar during a conference in Williamsburg: "I don't know how you can do this job," he said, "unless you have angst every day about the job you are doing?"

Anyway, that abusive "testing culture" we complain about in the United States, in Britain, in Canada, in Australia, in Irish secondary schools... does it really start with government bureaucrats like Arne Duncan and Michael Gove or with corporate thieves like Pearson? Or does it start with the practices we too often allow to exist in our classrooms?

- Ira Socol

The Wager

Let's bet on this...

Since Republicans seem to be ready to nominate America's Gambler-in-Chief, I thought this might be a good moment to make a bet with America's Governors and State Legislators.

Listening to this NPR News story today, I considered that, if our "standards" in education are to have any meaning at all, they must be standards for policy makers as well. Because, if you've ever been in any school, I mean really been there, you know the disconnect between standards and reality. "“I went to a remedial reading class for students, there was a girl there who was getting mostly A’s in her honors classes, and she was sitting in a remedial class learning how to read,” Rick Roach of the Orange County (Florida) School Board said. “She would be taking piano if she wasn’t taking that [remedial class]. These kids get put into an academic jail because some test says they can’t read. It’s just not right.”

put up, or shut up, as we learned on our playgrounds

Roach, had just voluntarily taken the FCAT, Florida's "high-stakes" 10th grade exam. “I won’t beat around the bush. The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62%. In our system, that’s a ‘D,’ and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction… It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a Bachelor of Science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate. I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities….”

And Mr. Roach's experience (hear a long interview here) led me to this idea. I want to bet every US Governor, along with every State Legislator who has supported or voted for standardized testing, supported or voted for "more rigorous" curricula, or who has supported or voted for holding back diplomas or retaining children, to take the tests. The real tests. To make this completely fair, let's do it soon (on "our" schedule, not that of the test takers), and lets give each one of these state 10th grade exams randomly chosen. So when our "leaders" sit down, they might get a test from their state, or any other state, being that we're all "Common Core" you know.

The Case Against Standardized Tests

The Case Against High-Stakes Testing

Standardized Testing and its Victims

When Learning No Longer Matters [pdf]

The Threat to Authenticity 

Testing cannot be anything but political and abusive [SpeEdChange]

Quantum Theory, the Uncertainty Principle, and the Alchemyof Standardized Testing

What Happened to Recess and Why Are Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten? [book review]

And here's the bet. Standards being standards. You governors and legislators, you take the exam in front of you, under the conditions your students take it, and if you fail, you resign immediately.

Doesn't this seem fair? Wouldn't this prove your political point - that the ability to pass these exams is all important?

And if you "guys" cannot pass the test, well... what might that prove?

So this is a serious wager, a serious challenge. I'm quite for that if I ask the teachers of America, they'll be happy to even come in on a Saturday - on their own time - and proctor the exam. Let's get going. If you all pass the tests you'll be sending an important message to your state's students, and surely you want to do that, right?

- Ira Socol

who asks you to copy this and email it to your Governor and legislators.

The Demons of the Duncan Contradiction and Teacher Education

In a New York Times “Room for Debate” feature on teacher certification, an Alexandria, Virginia English teacher named Patrick Welsh unwittingly presents, in one clear paragraph, the problem with the Obama Administration’s educational policies.

“The credentialing game in public education may have once been a well-meaning effort to create some measurable criteria to maintain standards, but it has turned into an absurd process that forces both teachers and administrators to waste time jumping through hoops that have little or no relation to their job performance.”

Welsh, a Washington Post Blogger often deeply frustrated with educational change (he openly worries about schools with “too much technology”) is writing to oppose teacher certification requirements and – by extension – teacher training in and of itself. He spells out his hoped for situation: “A good start to ensure that schools get the best people in the classrooms would be to stop filtering candidates through personnel offices obsessed with education courses and “certification,” and allow individual schools to advertise for the positions they need, and then allow principals along with panels of teachers to hire enthusiastic candidates who exhibit knowledge and love of their subject and a passion for communicating that knowledge and love to students.”

The fact that Welsh can quote only a couple of locally observed anecdotes in defense of his position while others in the debate – taking the other side – can back their positions up with data is not the problem for the Obama administration. The problem is simply that Arne Duncan is taking opposite sides in the same debate: On hand he is arguing that teacher credentialing is unimportant, that traditional paths to teaching are no longer valid, that testing of new teachers for certification no longer has a place. Yet, his other hand is insisting on the most traditional measures of student achievement and teacher evaluation. Anyone with “enthusiasm” and “knowledge” can become a teacher in Duncan’s view, but every student must jump through annual hoops and certify themselves on achievement tests or both the student and his or her teacher fail. A funhouse mirror of education policies.

Which is it Mr. Obama? Are standardized tests and standardized curricula valid? Is it essential that all students attend a certain amount of school before they can claim some sort of certification? Or should a student be able to simply prove that they are “enthusiastic” and “exhibit knowledge”? Do I need to attend Mr. Welsh's classes at T.C. Williams High School or may I just read and write on my own until I satisfy my own preparatory needs for university?

Put another way, how do you tell a student that they must complete a specific set of courses, send a specific number of hours, days, years in school, pass a certain test – if that student’s teachers have had to do none of that in order to hold their present position?

Or in its most simple form – the argument for alternative certification for teachers, and the argument for “outsider run schools” (Charters), are clearly arguments for less standardization in school curricula and school assessment. The argument is that “school” – as we now understand it – is not the appropriate place to learn for many of our students – whether those are K-12 students or future educators. That standardized curricula, evaluations, and assessments are bad preparation for life and bad measures of capability - again, for K-12 students or future educators.

As for me – I believe in alternative teacher certification just as I believe in alternative educational opportunities for all students. And I believe in high expectations – for K-12 students and for new teachers – but I put little faith in industrial standards, whether those be the standards for a high school diploma (Did you come to class often enough? Did you do enough homework to make your algebra teacher happy?), a college degree (Did you click enough times in your Intro to Sociology lecture?), a PhD (Have you mastered APA Style, or is MLA?), or a teacher certification (Are you very good at sitting for very long tests?).

But I also know that teaching is the most important profession a society has. And I know that after a very selective, very extensive, and very expansive five-year program of teacher education, our Michigan State University College of Education grads are still often missing a great deal of information we wish we could find time to get in. Learning to be a great teacher is just a difficult thing. Why anyone would imagine you could become a great teacher in fewer years than you would need to become a great doctor is beyond my understanding.

So I want better teacher education programs. I want more flexible teacher education programs. I want teacher education programs more adapted to the diverse needs of the diverse people we want to attract into teaching. And I want teacher education programs with much more time spent in actual K-12 classrooms.

Just as I want better public schools. More flexible public schools. Public schools not tied to standardized tests and public schools with diverse choices meeting the needs of diverse learners. And I want public schools more firmly connected to the world our students live and learn in.

But my goal is not to eliminate either teacher training or public schools. Eliminating those institutions will not make either better – and eliminating either or both will not improve education at all.

- Ira Socol