Performance was down. American students were doing poorly, apparently not learning much, advancing from grade to grade without gaining any momentum as readers, as writers, as thinkers. It needed to change!
True.
So, in Texas, a bastion of learning and educational renovation, the idea of implementing standardized tests came along and hit everyone on the head. WHAM! It was either a moment of gestalt "AHA!" or Three Stooges taking a swipe from a parallel universe.
Standardized tests moved the world in a better direction once. To get into top colleges like Yale and Harvard, students needed to come from famous homes, noteworthy families, offer a decent report card, sure, with terrific recommendations, and show themselves "special" in an interview. The process was skewed toward cronies, nepotism, donations, scholarly mediocrity combined with athletic superiority, or other mixtures of slop and circumstance which spun the dial toward upper class white, and provided static for applicants of color, gender, religion, and other stages in the theater of modern democratic society. Obvious leaders and winners were accepted, but they needed to prove themselves socially, which was a burden given their isolation in the rich, white world of top colleges. And then came the SAT.
James Bryant Conant, President of Harvard, added the SAT test to admissions criteria for America's oldest and most prestigious institution in the 1940's. Further, he pushed the nation to adopt the test to level the playing field for discovering top talent, allowing the underdog achievers throughout the country, those without a famous moniker or lineage, to enter into the hallowed halls of the ivy league. World War II had been a spectacular proving ground of greatness, demonstrating that things like character, problem solving, and execution of brilliant strategies were not limited to nice families or famous names. Harvard wanted to see some of that refreshing greatness that showed itself all over the battlefields of modern history. SAT testing offered scores that were standard, fair, obviously unbiased testimony of preparedness and achievement. The nation followed, and the underdog was soon allowed to be a member of the alpha pack, provided amongst other things he could prove achievement and promise of future greatness as his badge of honor -- a kind of badge of possibilities.
And now we are in decline as a nation, and greatness doesn't interest us so much any more. What does interest us is losing out statistically, 21st in literacy rates compared to number one nation, Georgia, or number two, Cuba. Ahead of us in teaching reading and writing are: Estonia, Latvia, Barbados, Slovenia, Belarus, Lithuania, Ukraine, Kazakhstan (the country made fun of by Borat), Tajikistan (which you may have never heard of unless you are very good in Geography or one of the successful takers of the Foreign Service Exam), but those two countries -- the one seen as so backward and funny in Borat, and the one you may not have ever heard in the news, tie for tenth place in teaching literacy, both hold a ranking of 99.6 percent literacy for their populace.
We are in decline in competitiveness. Other nations are teaching more computer literacy, more languages, including the number one language of the world, Mandarin, which our schools mostly do not offer. When I ask my students what language they think is the most spoken language in the world, they either guess English or Spanish, because those are the languages offered on campus. (No one suggests Latin, though that is also offered as an elective, like Spanish.) But, to be internationally competitive, we should be pushing languages as part of this push for literacy. Students in The Netherlands, those funny, blonde kids with wooden shoes, speak up to six languages. Languages teach vocabulary by showing relationships between words, telling stories about language's adventurous hike through time, creating meaning and interest outside of the belly button of our borders. Languages build interest in historical understanding and help create bridges to relating to other nations. Why isn't our big push for achievement in this arena?
Our solution, to get back some of our clout and statistical edge, is to treat everything like a business. Interesting model, given the recent near-collapse of Wall Street, the Charlie Chaplin skidding in the hallways of economics to keep from falling flat on our faces in a new depression. Nonetheless, this is our model, privatization. Never mind it hasn't worked anywhere and is one of the causes of the French Revolution, we forge ahead, unconcerned with details like history near or far.
Now those standardized tests are being used to shine a light on failure, not greatness. And rather than reward greatness with opportunity at the top, we are going to emphasize punishing poor scores with less money, less opportunities to fail more kids, because the greatness that was once seen as the shining light of individual achievement is now seen as the poorness that is the dim bulb of mass institutional underachievement. We used to hold up the winners. Now we hold back the losers. No child gets left behind, but very few teachers are getting ahead. We are going to slap the lazy teachers silly, defund their schools in fact, if those scores -- remember the standardized tests that once leveled the playing field? -- don't rise.
Problem is it doesn't really help kids. The testing obsession causes many problems. If people's salaries are going to be attached to those scores, why would anyone want to teach troubled kids? Why would you agree to teach mentally or emotionally challenged kids? You don't get rewarded for the hard work of calming a tough class, you get dinged on the salary scale -- and your school gets dinged for its neighborhood illiteracy rate, unless the scores keep going up at a ridiculously paced rate -- unless you raise scores in spite of the daunting challenges of classroom management, education defunding from economic downturns separate from the rewards and punishments of No Child Left Behind, growing class size from the defunding of America. Why?
I teach in a school with mixed populations. The difference in abilities from the low end of the school up to the highly gifted classes is striking. The system doesn't offer as much concern for fairness and support to teachers but insists teachers show support and greater effort to reach out to kids who are failing or not gaining momentum fast enough (These are kids who sometimes tag books and desks, steal supplies, interrupt instruction repeatedly, and flatly state, "I don't care," "I'm not interested," "I don't want to learn this..." ). And that is unfair and unsupportive, and it's unrealistic, and it isn't working. To add to that difficult situation the solution of cutting the school's budget unless certain bench marks keep being met seems absurd. To outsiders it seems absurd we have declined as a country, and any solution is a good as another, and to those outsiders the teachers are the obvious fall guys.
Teachers may be making better statistics nationally, but they aren't doing better emotionally. And it all gets passed on. More and more teachers are doing less and less. The toll in morale of being judged by something standardized, once used as a litmus test for discovering a general educational temperature of each individual, but now used as a test of teachers and institutions, is a problem for the future of teaching. Nobody takes school as seriously as teachers. Teachers have a passion for certain areas of curriculum, those places where they can teach from the heart and offer part of their soul, rare and wonderful anecdotes, creative lessons and higher level questions, all because of the excitement they feel for these parts of the standard curriculum. It raises the level of learning to have excited teaching. Instead, tell teachers their incomes or the school's outcomes depend on test scores, and you've changed the focus from educating to a game playing strategy of preparing for a testing outcome.
Schools like Harvard bragged, "Don't let your classes get in the way of your education." There was an understanding about learning from all around your campus and its environs, from the bright fellow students, the teachers who were dorm masters offering wisdom across a plate of roast beef in the dorm dining hall, the poets visiting for a week who might be found in the library or bookstore, the concert playing nearby which might conflict with book time. But the overall push was to increase ones cultural as well as academic achievement. The whole shift is so cynical. The world is voting to tell teachers, "Don't let your passion for pockets of curriculum get in the way of your students' test scores." And its wrong, it's a push downward, it's anti-educational, and it's not actually testing achievement, it's derailing it.
