Millennial Debate Standardized Testing Debate
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Alienates KidsStandardized testing alienates teachers from teachingAnya Kamatez, journalist and education writer, 2015, The Test – Why Our Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing – But you don’t have to be, Kindle Edition, page number at end of card 4. They are making teachers hate teaching. I want my child taught by proud, well-paid, highly engaged professionals. But high-stakes standardized tests deprofessionalize teaching because they give outside authorities the final say on how teachers should do their jobs. The testing company determines the quality of teachers’ performance. In judging students’ progress, the law gives test scores more weight than the observations of people who spend time with the kids every day. Possibly the most politically charged application of standardized testing is the rapid growth in the use of these tests in teacher evaluation. Teachers used to be evaluated solely by their supervisors, and the vast majority historically got satisfactory ratings regardless of how well the school or their students were doing. Race to the Top, a 2009 Department of Education initiative under President Obama, instead rewarded states for evaluating teachers based on student test scores in the hope that this would be more objective. According to the National Council on Teacher Quality, from 2009 to 2012 thirty-six states and the District of Columbia have changed the rules for teacher evaluation. Thirty states now require these evaluations to include “objective measures of student achievement,” which in practice nearly always means test scores. Eighteen states and the District of Columbia actually base tenure decisions on the test scores of a teacher’s students. How do you judge a teacher based on their student’s test scores? Not very well. Obviously you can’t take a teacher whose students are the children of Hispanic migrant workers and simply compare their test scores to those of the teacher teaching the rich kids up the hill to figure out who is a better teacher. Value-added measurements were thus concocted. These take students’ scores one year and their scores the next year (or, sometimes, their scores on the same test repeated in the fall and the spring) and compare them to a model that predicts how much they should have grown over that time period. The teachers’ “value add” is how much the student actually gains compared to what was predicted. There are a lot of holes in this approach. There is no value-added data at all on kindergartners through third graders, in the years before official testing begins, although some states have added yet more tests to rectify this problem. Should physical education, art, science, and social studies teachers be evaluated based on their students’ math and reading skills? What about students who transfer into a class midyear? What about team teachers? What about specialists? What about students who are often absent? What if tests and/ or cutoff scores change and test results drop district-wide as a result? In a 2011 paper, “Getting Teacher Evaluation Right,” the Stanford researcher Linda Darling-Hammond and three other education researchers concluded that value-added measurements should only be used alongside other means of evaluation and in a low-stakes way. Their research showed that ratings for individual teachers were highly unstable, varying from year to year and from one test to another. A vivid example of the instability of value-added formulas is the story of Carolyn Abbott, the “worst” eighth-grade math teacher in New York City. Abbott taught math to both seventh and eighth graders at the Anderson School, a public school in Manhattan that pulls students from all over the city for its gifted and talented program. Her seventh-grade students performed in the 98th percentile on the 2009 state test. Based on their high scores, the value-added model predicted that these students would perform at or above the 97th percentile the following year. But in 2010 Abbott taught this exact same class of students, now in the eighth grade. By this time these students were far ahead of the material covered on the state test, which they had learned in fifth grade at Anderson. They were preparing instead for a much tougher, high school– level Regents Exam in algebra and were busy applying to high schools. “The eighth-graders don’t care; they rush through the exam, and they don’t check their work,” Abbott told the Washington Post. “The test has no effect on them. I can’t make an argument that it counts for kids. The seventh-graders, they care a bit more.” So her eighth graders, who had been 98th-percentile performers as seventh graders the year before, slacked their way to “only” the 89th percentile in 2010. The value-added formula blamed Abbott for the relatively large drop in scores, thus anointing her the worst eighth-grade math teacher in New York. New York City’s Department of Education, over the objection of the teachers’ union, released its Teacher Data Report to major media outlets, and Abbott’s name and rank were published far and wide. Abbott had the support of her administration and her students’ parents, but the experience was so “humiliating” that she left teaching for a PhD program in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s too hard to be a teacher in New York City,” she told one blogger. “Everything is stacked against you. You can’t just measure what teachers do and slap a number on it.” “Teachers are demoralized and feel very powerless” because of test-driven accountability, said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the two national unions. “Large numbers of teachers are retiring. The attrition rate in big cities is around 50 percent,” up to a high of 70 percent after five years in Washington, DC. The 2012 annual MetLife Survey of the American Teacher showed that the percentage of teachers who are “very satisfied” with their jobs had sunk to 39 percent, its lowest point since 1987. Half of teachers said they felt very stressed. Only a fifth to a quarter of teachers in other surveys express faith that tests are accurate reflections of their students’ learning. “These are pretty shoddy tests,” said Weingarten. “When everything becomes about data and testing, it wholly controverts the purposes of education.” Teachers are taking to YouTube, blogs, Tumblr, and Twitter to describe just how demoralizing standardized tests are to them personally. A veteran fourth-grade teacher in Florida resigned in May 2013 via YouTube. “I have experienced the depressing gradual downfall and misdirection of education that has slowly eaten away at my love of teaching,” she said in her video. Curtains blow gently in the breeze behind her; her face is haggard. “Raising students’ test scores on standardized tests is now the only goal. . . . Everything I loved about teaching is extinct.” The video has over 600,000 views. Kamenetz, Anya (2015-01-06). The Test: Why Our Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing–But You Don't Have to Be (p. 23). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. 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