Berliner Nails Testing

Dr David Berliner has penned a must-read for every person concerned about education.

But because Secretary Duncan does not have classroom experience, he may not know that teachers evaluate their students every day, 180 times a school year. The fact that under our laws these teachers have no say in evaluating their students’ skills and abilities is really quite ludicrous.

Teachers Plan to Boycott Tests

From The Sydney Morning Herald:

Tension between the national teacher union and Labor governments will escalate into industrial warfare as teachers prepare to boycott national literacy and numeracy testing this year.

The Australian Education Union, which represents more than 180,000 teachers in public schools around the country, will put the recommendation to delegates at its annual federal conference in Melbourne today.

The president of the union, Angelo Gavrielatos, said the looming threat of school league tables [school rankings based on student test scores] had ''united the profession in a way not seen before in Australia''.

He said despite their stated opposition to league tables and the simplistic ranking and comparison of schools, state and federal governments had failed to prevent them.

The Politics of Testing Gaps

Testing was once used to measure what a student learned. NCLB turned it into a political tool.

Testing Wisdom

An eighty-year-old former teacher provides her insight to the testing madness and mandates:

I am 86 years old and taught frequently until I was 80. I get annoyed by the controversy of “No Child Left Behind.” Of course, some children will be left behind others. They were born that way. Height, weight, IQ, interests, ambitions – the Good Lord made us that way.

A teacher’s job is to evaluate students, accept those differences, and working effectively with them – not to reject or warp them by forcing them to work at an impossible level.

Testing students should be for three purposes:

– To determine what the group as a whole knows and to identify those who need special attention;

– to use the information and instruct effectively to do the maximum good;

– And to determine the effectiveness of your program.

No teacher can ever expect to make all students equal. The challenge is to find ways to meet the needs of students at their level, accepting that there will be a need to group, individualize or accept that some students will not be capable of achieving at a higher level. So help them achieve at their level.

As for “teaching the test,” why not? It makes no sense to test for what has not been taught. Teach in Greek and test in English?

Give students a list of answers? No. But teach the test and then test to see if they are capable of understanding and retaining the material. That’s what politicians consider “teaching the test.”

It is remarkable that, 40 or 50 years ago, we were capable of graduating doctors, lawyers, rocket scientists, bank presidents, journalist, and we enjoyed seeing the students progress at their intended level.

Now we are expected to make geniuses of normal students, so we wind up with frustrated students, irate parents, and criminal teachers.

Kindergarten Make Your Belly Ache?

Well, probably not if you attended Kindergarten over two decades ago. Since then things have dramatically changed.

What we expected of first-graders 20 years ago is being required of kindergartners today. Reading. Sight vocabulary. Spelling. Writing. Yes, many 5-year-olds can learn those things, but many can't pass the stress test. They react with belly-aches, misbehavior and hating school.

That, my friends, is the unintended consequence of No Child Left Behind and any other legislation that rewards performance on multiple choice tests over authentic learning. Kids burn out. Kids drop out.

Who would say such? A Kindergarten teacher.

Teachers or Trainers

In replying to an article written by Diana Senechal (There is No Such Thing As Teaching), Diane Ravitch offers a sharp rebuke for those who believe tests are the best or the only way to measure what a student has learned.

“Diana Senechal is absolutely right. The economists, statisticans, and number-crunchers with MBA degrees are trying to turn education into a data-driven activity, where we can keep score and find out who "won." But that’s not education! As Senechal points out, good teachers have mastery and love of whatever they teach, and the data will not reflect that. In fact, the data will capture only the narrowest aspects of schooling (not education), which is whether students get higher scores on standardized tests of basic skills. Children can be trained to get the right answer, like parrots or seals, but the higher scores are not a measure of a good education or a good teacher.”