Marion Brady,
Washington Post, December 5, 2011
A longtime friend on the school board of one
of the largest school systems in America did something that few
public servants are willing to do. He took versions of his
state's high-stakes standardized math and reading tests for 10th
graders, and said he'd make his scores public.
By any reasonable measure, my friend is a success. His now-grown
kids are well-educated. He has a big house in a good part of
town. Paid-for condo in the Caribbean. Influential friends. Lots
of frequent flyer miles. Enough time of his own to give serious
attention to his school board responsibilities. The margins of
his electoral wins and his good relationships with
administrators and teachers testify to his openness to dialogue
and willingness to listen.
He called me the morning he took the test to say he was sure he
hadn't done well, but had to wait for the results. A couple of
days ago, realizing that local school board members don't seem
to be playing much of a role in the current "reform" brouhaha, I
asked him what he now thought about the tests he'd taken.
"I won't beat around the bush," he wrote in an email. "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.
He continued, "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.
"I have a wide circle of friends in various professions. Since
taking the test, I've detailed its contents as best I can to
many of them, particularly the math section, which does more
than its share of shoving students in our system out of school
and on to the street. Not a single one of them said that the
math I described was necessary in their profession.
"It might be argued that I've been out of school too long, that
if I'd actually been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test,
the material would have been fresh. But doesn't that miss the
point? A test that can determine a student's future life chances
should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements
of life. I can't see how that could possibly be true of the test
I took."
Here's the clincher in what he wrote:
"If I'd been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th
grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different.
I'd have been told I wasn't 'college material,' would probably
have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level
of ability that the test said I had.
"It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for
shaping a student's entire future has so little apparent
relevance to adult, real-world functioning. Who decided the kind
of questions and their level of difficulty? Using what criteria?
To whom did they have to defend their decisions? As
subject-matter specialists, how qualified were they to make
general judgments about the needs of this state's children in a
future they can't possibly predict? Who set the pass-fail "cut
score"? How?"
"I can't escape the conclusion that decisions about the [state
test] in particular and standardized tests in general are being
made by individuals who lack perspective and aren't really
accountable."
There you have it. A concise summary of what's wrong with
present corporately driven education change: Decisions are being
made by individuals who lack perspective and aren't really
accountable.
Those decisions are shaped not by knowledge or understanding of
educating, but by ideology, politics, hubris, greed, ignorance,
the conventional wisdom, and various combinations thereof. And
then they're sold to the public by the rich and powerful.
All that without so much as a pilot program to see if their
simplistic, worn-out ideas work, and without a single procedure
in place that imposes on them what they demand of teachers:
accountability.
But maybe there's hope. As I write, a New York Times story by
Michael Winerip makes my day. The stupidity of the current
test-based thrust of reform has triggered the first revolt of
school principals.
Winerip writes: "As of last night, 658 principals around the
state (New
York) had signed a letter - 488 of them from Long Island, where
the insurrection began - protesting the use of students' test
scores to evaluate teachers' and principals' performance."
One of those school principals, Winerip says, is Bernard Kaplan.
Kaplan runs one of the highest-achieving schools in the state,
but is required to attend 10 training sessions.
"It's education by humiliation," Kaplan said. "I've never seen
teachers and principals so degraded."
Carol Burris, named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School
Administrators Association of New York State, has to attend
those 10 training sessions.
Katie Zahedi, another principal, said the session she attended
was "two days of total nonsense. I have a Ph.D., I'm in a school
every day, and some consultant is supposed to be teaching me to
do evaluations."
A fourth principal, Mario Fernandez, called the evaluation
process a product of "ludicrous, shallow thinking. They're
expecting a tornado to go through a junkyard and have a brand
new Mercedes pop up."
My school board member-friend concluded his email with this: "I
can't escape the conclusion that those of us who are expected to
follow through on decisions that have been made for us are doing
something ethically questionable."
He's wrong. What they're being made to do isn't ethically
questionable. It's ethically unacceptable. Ethically
reprehensible. Ethically indefensible.
How many of the approximately 100,000 school principals in the
U.S. would join the revolt if their ethical principles trumped
their fears of retribution? Why haven't they been asked?
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