The NYT Disappoints

Today's editorial in The New York Times, "Are They Learning?," comments on the cheating scandal in Atlanta. It is the most disappointing commentary I've read in some time.

It is disappointing because of the simplistic, wrong-headed conclusion the editors express.

It proves just how little the pundits are paying attention to what has been going on in our public schools. And if they aren't paying attention, who is?

It is disappointing because NYT has bought the arguments sold to the public and the media by very powerful special interest groups.

It is disappointing in the extreme because the editors do not blame the testing culture for the rampant cheating that has gone on.  Testing, in their eyes, is OK.  In their words: "It's the cheats who need to go, not the tests."

The editorial underscores that regular classroom teachers have an even smaller voice than ever as we Race to the Top of a Mountain of Testing and Test Scores.  Will no one ever listen to those who live in the landscape?

To answer the paper's question in a word: "No."  Our children are not learning.

Classroom teachers have been decrying the death of learning for the past ten years, and now the NYT and all the rest have come down on the wrong side:  Keep the tests.  Punish the adults.

I can fully understand how teachers can be pressured into changing scores.  We are at the bottom of a very long hierarchy, and doing what we're told is communicated in many, many ways.

Teachers are encouraged to "get along" and "be team players."   If teachers are not fired outright, their professional lives can be made a living hell.  Many good teachers have already been driven from the classroom.

In the current climate the numbers of reports and plans required by administration have multiplied to the point of exhausting teachers outside of the classroom, while demanding ever more in the classroom. We often suffer through the demands with our hands tied, neither controlling district nor school-wide decision making.

In the testing culture, teaching professionals have been systematically de-professionalized.  Districts have scripted instruction, set pacing guides that include regular testing windows, cannabilized instruction time for testing schedules, and pulled students--the well-known "bubble kids"--to remediate, remediate, remediate.

Large scale meetings have routinely focused on the numbers and have often resorted to humiliating whole groups of teachers.  ("Stand up if you are in a school that did not make AYP."   "What are you going to do this year to wipe that 'L' for 'Loser' off your forehead?"  These are sadly real comments heard in real meetings.)

For the thousandth time, yes, we need accountability.  But it needs to be non-invasive, low-stress, and less frequent then the "test every child every year in every subject" being pushed by the current Department of Education.  The NAEP that the Times calls impervious to tampering is a fine example of how we can routinely measure progress in our schools.

Here's a news flash: kids do not progress in a linear fashion.  Sometimes they regress, circle around, and then leap forward.   (Ask your tennis pro.  He'll tell you the same thing about athletes.)  We can't keep pushing kids through an education extruder.  It won't work.  They won't learn that way.  They aren't learning that way.

On the other hand, adults learn very quickly that if we need high pass rates to keep our jobs, then high pass rates will be had--learning be damned.

We need reform, and it needs to look like this: Take all that testing money and invest it in teachers.

While we've pushed tests for the last ten years we have done nothing to ensure that we have well-trained, effective adults in the classroom.  Ironically, we have gone in the opposite direction, letting any and all take a stab at teaching.  (TFA, Troops to Teachers, Career-switchers, long-term subs, etc.)

In the age when we are learning more daily about the brain and how brain-friendly strategies can improve learning for all, we are throwing open the doors and letting those with even less training take on the complex problems of helping our growing numbers of impoverished children succeed.  And, unsurprisingly, the less-trained teacher is fleeing even faster than the career teacher.

The Times is wrong.  We don't need better tests, better accountability, or better laws.

We need an army of well-trained teachers.

If the Times is this far off the mark, good luck convincing the public that better teachers not better tests are what our children need.

Please March.

Fake Reading

We have just finished the End of Course SOL series for our 11th grade students.  The barrier test for graduation lies in the English SOLs.  All students must pass both the Writing and Reading tests prior to graduating or they will not receive a valid diploma.  The two tests represent a minimum competency.

Basic literacy is the most important outcome for any education.  All graduates should be able to read and write well enough to both receive and extend a clear message.

But as I work with students who struggle on the Reading test, I have more and more misgivings about what we are learning about their abilities to negotiate a world which will require them to read.  (And for this post I will not even get into the validity question that is begged when a student can literally fail the test one day and pass the next. It happens frequently and with a wide swing of scores.)

Reading tests do not mirror an authentic reading situation.

When we read in the real world we read for a number of reasons: for pleasure, to gather information, to consider different points of view, to reach our own self-selected goals.

The first step in any authentic reading situation involves a measure of choice on the part of the reader.  Do I want to read this?  Why am I reading it?  What do I hope to get from the reading to which I am devoting my intellectual energies?

Real reading also exists in a context.  Is this reading for work? For recreation? To complete a task I very much want to complete?   Why do I need to read this?

None of these situations exist in a Reading Comprehension test.

The purpose of the reading is to pass the test.  Nothing more.

For that reason, test takers are interested in only one thing: What is the right answer?  To me, this perverts the entire process.

In helping students master the test I often find myself exhorting them: "Pretend to be interested in what you're reading. Try to find something you care about."  The key to their success lies in whether or not they can engage in the reading before answering the questions.

Most students choose the expedient method:  Read the questions (not the passage) and then go looking for the answer.  This would explain why so many students struggle with inference questions.  These questions rely on the student's understanding of the piece as a whole along with its implications.

For the struggling student, finding the motivation to read a passage that is of no interest to them is a huge hurdle.  For school-friendly students--those who have accepted the game the grownups seem to be playing--motivating themselves to read through passages that are of no particular interest is not a problem.  In many cases they have been doing this (and doing it well enough) their entire schooling lives.

The state test requires students to read forms, sometimes an application form, sometimes a flyer for an upcoming program, and so forth.  I suspect that if a student wanted a job or to attend a concert and had to read and fill out an application form to meet those goals, their comprehension would soar.  In an earlier version of the state test students had to read and answer questions about an application for volunteer services directed largely to retirees.  Really?  The average age of a typical reader of that form would be, I suspect, 60 years old.  These are sixteen year old boys and girls who have yet to start a career much less retire from one.  Who cares?

Perhaps this explains the boys in particular who have been unable to pass the state reading test while concurrently passing an EMT or Firefighter test.  Both of these civil service tests are formidable, and yet, (according to test scores) our worst students seem capable of passing them in order to gain entry into a career the young men are passionate about.

Reading Comprehension tests have never been my favorite.  Inevitably they make me feel stupid.  Especially the main idea questions where I, and frequently my students, struggle in deciding which answer is more right than another.

For one whole year in elementary school (maybe it was fourth or fifth grade) Montgomery County schools insisted on the SRA reading program.  We read (out of context) selections on cards and followed them with mini-reading comprehension tests. They sat on a shelf in colored boxes, each color showing the progression through grade-leveled readings.  (I am still amused by the methods used to shield students from their "levels."  We all knew which colors were harder just as we knew the Bluebird reading group was comprised of the top performers.)

Despite being a voracious reader at the time, I did not progress very quickly through the colored boxes because you had to hit a certain score before moving on.  I came to dread that shelf of boxes and clearly came away with the idea that "I am not a very good reader."

During the day I was forming a poor image of myself as a reader while every night I was zooming through the Little House on the Prairie series, all of Ray Bradbury, every Nancy Drew book I could find, Boxcar Children, Cherry Ames Student Nurse, all the Beverly Cleary books, historical fiction about the westward migration, and twenty-five cent comic books which introduced me to all the great works of literature in the form of Illustrated Classics.


Test taking has taken its toll in classroom use of time that could be better spent in helping students--especially struggling students--find authentic purposes for reading.

On testing...

OK.  Like I promised.  Here's my take on the day long scoring of student portfolios.  

• I liked doing it because I wanted to learn the process so I'd understand it from the classroom side - especially if I were to have to collect for a portfolio myself.  (I picked up a number of time saving tips from looking at various methods.)
  
• I'm glad teachers were the scorers.  We all learned about our students and the teachers who work with them.  We all will be better at evaluating and collecting work down the road.
  
• A lot of money was spent that day.  
  

There were about 30 teachers, some of whom worked the whole 8 hours.  All of whom had to go through mandatory training prior to the scoring day.  All of whom had to be paid for the training time and scoring time.  (Hey, I don't mind making a little extra money....)

There was a lot of material provided by the testing company.   More money.

There was a computer program for collecting, checking, aggregating the scores.  More money.

And then all those computer collected scores go on to be verified at the state level. More...you got it.

I kept imagining the program being reproduced all over the state and the money spent kept piling up in my imagination.   

And this is just a small part of our end of year evaluations. There are End of Course tests in most classes that my students sit in - and all of those tests have to be bought and paid for. (Note to self: upon retirement check job availability at Pearson or College Board.)

Is this the best way to spend our education dollars?  

In the old days we trusted our teachers to evaluate students.  Were teachers different then? Maybe yes, maybe no.

I know teaching and learning was different then. (I've got my old report cards to prove it. We spent years of class time on handwriting in elementary school.  It was called Writing and had nothing to do with essays.  It was penmanship. We've got other things to teach these days.)

Ironically, as we sorted through the samples of student work the one comment that kept coming up was that student work was always easier to score when A TEACHER wrote a comment of her/his own on the paper to describe what was observed.  Hmmm, narratives by teachers - still the strongest bits of evidence.