National testing rates a low score
Commentary by JoEllen Collins
Through many years of being a teacher, mother and citizen,
I have seen "remedies" for the woes that beset public education
come and go.
When my brother was a child, the use of phonics to teach
reading was abandoned, only to be reinstated years later with a
combination of improved techniques.
In February I spent a delightful evening listening to Bill
Cosby perform. He joked that the main difference between now and his youth
was that, instead of being found dyslexic or hyperactive, he was just
labeled "stupid." We all laughed, but the laughter reflected a
rueful sense of reality. My brother was a child who, in the 50s began a
school career of failure. When his excessive energy was read as
naughtiness in kindergarten, there were no education learning specialists
or teachers who knew what to do with him. Pre-counseling and pre-Ritalin,
he floundered from the minute his tiny shoes entered the classroom until
he finally made it into a small Christian college willing to give him a
chance. Unfortunately, when his girlfriend became pregnant, the college
expelled him for "moral turpitude." His natural intelligence has
never been channeled positively in an educational environment.
I remember a student of mine, a captive in the late-60s of
a then-popular educational "remedy," who begged to be admitted
to my college-preparatory senior English class. Labeled as low average as
a first grader, perhaps because of his Spanish language background, he
spent years in boring classes segregated according to ability groupings.
This practice, called "tracking," was a policy of the time later
to be abandoned and then reinstated in many public schools.
Teachers were supposed to grade students with a whole
school comparison, remedial (termed RR) students compared to superior (XX)
students; thus my average (T for "typical," believe it or not)
students were not supposed to get more than a "C" grade. Imagine
the frustration of a teenager who learned the material geared to his level
and was rewarded with only a "C." No wonder my student yearned
for a more challenging classroom environment. As it turned out, he still
got a "C" the first semester, and then a "B" the next.
The experience didn’t change his records much, but being in a place of
stimulating ideas did. It was, he said, the first time in 12 years that he
had looked forward to class.
I have a concern with the latest "remedy." At a
time when The University of California is considering dropping the
inclusion of SAT scores in determining college admission, our president is
urging the use of widespread testing of students to ascertain the success
of public education. I worry about this reflex back to a more conservative
means of rating school performance, even though I grant that some
accountability is needed. I simply don’t think this is the way to do it.
I fear the installation of a national testing system and
the massive amounts of money involved, most of which will profit testing
companies and the infrastructure needed to administer the examinations. I
would rather see the money used to insure smaller classes and honor gifted
teachers, both proven boosters for student success.
But what I really worry about is that teachers across this
country will feel pressured to teach to the test.
As a Peace Corps teacher in Thailand, I taught my students
conversational English, according to Thai government requests. Yet my
fellow English teachers, Thais who had been trained to instruct via rote
and memorization, felt they couldn’t adopt my methods because their
students had to shine on district-wide language proficiency tests. I was
dismayed when I saw the head of the English department teaching her kids
to memorize the correct answers to the tests.
I found a similar push to have students excel in required
tests when I taught at Beverly Hills High School. While my colleagues
engaged in excellent and dynamic instruction and curricula, still they
felt under constant pressure to train their college-bound students to do
well on SATs.
Recently the San Francisco Board of Education considered
revoking the contract of a private company hired to increase a charter
school’s test scores. It has been suggested that poorly performing
students were sent to other schools as a means of keeping school scores
high. Testing for accountability may be a "remedy" fraught with
pressures.
Our public schools have many problems, but most of them
are due to changing family structures, societal mores and population
shifts, I believe, than to a lack of quality instruction. My last public
school job, seven years ago, at a large LA high school, reminded me of the
daunting task educators face. Not only did I "rove" between five
different classrooms, but I was required by law to check for drug use, see
if students had bruises as signs of physical abuse, and then enforce a
school dress code which barred scarves, caps or baggy pants. This was
before even starting teaching! One of my seniors presented her semester
project on her involvement in a drive-by gang shooting. The other students
were blasé in reaction.
The kind of testing that is being proposed is not much
more than a waste of time. It is a Band-Aid that merely patches a small
part of the deep wounds infecting our families and schools.
