Peter Greene writes here about a scary article in Catalyst Chicago by a teacher who explains how she taught her five-year-olds to love testing. It should not surprise you to learn that this teacher is teaching in a charter school and that she hails from Teach for America and Teach Plus.
He writes:
Well, we can at least thank Bailey Reimer for giving us one more look at how reformsters think, and a chance to confront just how wrong-headed that thinking is.
Reimer is the author of “How Bailey Reinmer’s kindergartners came to love testing” (nothing about if they stopped worrying), and the piece in Catalyst Chicago is every bit as bad as you would imagine.
Reimer loves the Test, and her love leads her to say some astonishing things. She loves it, and she opens with the astonishing story of how much her students love it too– so much that they are sad when they learn they won’t be taking one tomorrow. “They love the uninterrupted work time and comparing their new score to their old one.” Because, yes, five year olds are famous for their long extension spans and their desire to do seatwork.
Reimer correctly points out that ESSA has cemented the Big Standardized Test into schools, and so her school figures why not just get started practicing with kindergartners (because apparently her charter school is run by people who don’t know much about child development). As Reimer tells her story, she throws in this set of non sequitors:
“To get to a point where my students appreciate and understand testing, I had to first appreciate it myself. I love tests that give me relevant, timely information about how my students are doing, from how many letter names they know to how many words per minute they read. According to reports by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, children who read proficiently by the end of 3rd grade are four times more likely to graduate from high school.”
If you need regular daily testing to tell how your kindergarten students are doing, you do not belong in a kindergarten classroom. And before one cites research, one should be clear on the difference between correlation and causation. However, Reimer might want to check out the research that shows that early “head starts” in learning pretty much disappear within a few years.
But that’s not the most astonishing thing she says.
“Of course, 5-year-olds don’t come to school automatically loving testing. As educators, it’s our job to build that appreciation and understanding.”
No. No no no no no no no no no, no. No, Ms. Reimer, that is most decidedly NOT our job. It is our job to build appreciation and understanding for reading, art, math, running and playing, and learning in general. It is not our job to make them love the test. It is certainly not our job to teach that school is a place we go to take tests and get ready to take tests.
Read on. This article by Bailey Reimer is one of the most horrible statements I have ever read. She needs help in learning about the purposes of education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
At the university where I work (as a librarian) there was a student research poster fair recently, with many education students presenting.
Nearly all the early childhood education presentations dealt with how to get little kids to sit still and pay attention to the teacher. Almost none had ideas about learning or teaching.
I do not know about early childhood education. But I was horrified.
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Sitting still is an essential college skill. Why wait?
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Aaron. Just hearing about that horrifies me.
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As far as I know duct tape works best. No need for fancy posters or research.
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Common Core is not about the kids, but the $$
http://www.projectveritas.com/posts/news/hidden-cam-another-publishing-executive-caught-dishing-dirt-common-core
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That “Catalyst Chicago” teacher profiled in that story is deeply and truly frightening. Not just for what she is doing, but for what she is thinking. Her goals, aspirations for her students are SO misdirected, so limiting, so stultifying. She really has no idea what a teacher is supposed to be, or do…… frightening.
If we set loose a whole generation of teachers like this…….all hope will be lost. There will be nobody left who knows better.
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This is one scary situation. So, the oligarch wants slaves who don’t question ANYTHING!
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Twisted. That’s the word that keeps coming to my mind to describe the warped reasoning that this naive and clearly uneducated young woman uses to justify her bad teaching.
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All Bailey Reimer did was change the definition of the word love to the definition for suffering: the state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship.
Her children are being taught that love means undergoing pain, distress and hardship.
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Sounds so kinky, Lloyd. I can just see Reimer all tied up, a whip at the ready. . . . I’d better stop there lest Diane will be accused of promoting pornography by the nefarious bastards that monitor this site for any little slip up by those who believe in “a better education for all”.
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Oh Bailey, what can I say?: Leave now before you do anymore harm. Better yet, have a few kids and let them undertake your bastardized form of public education.
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I taught elementary music and have worked with kindergarten and pre-school children.
I saw this headline and was expecting it to be comedy. Nobody who knows children of this age expect them to enjoy testing. What is Bailey Reimer thinking? She certainly is missing something important in her classroom. What horror!
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That is the problem with her and her ilk. They aren’t thinking.
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Reblogged this on 21st Century Theater.
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We’ve got to stop the “all data all the time” mentality of Gates and his ilk being forced on our students. Teaching is a lot more than being a collection agent. Too much collection time is time misspent, and opportunity lost that could be better spent teaching, guiding, listening, watching, inspiring, reading, solving and so much more!
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The self-anointed and now infamous authority on education known as the National Center for Teacher Quality (hugely funded by the Gates Foundation among others) has a January 2015 publication called “Learning about Learning: What Every New Teacher Needs to Know.”
Why Bother? Bear with me.
This publication, with multiple online Appendices, is intended to tell teachers and those who prepare teachers, that they are wasting time and money if they do not use the six and only six scientifically-based instructional methods put forth in documents from the Institute of Educational Sciences and endorsed by NCTQ’s panel of experts, most of these scholars in psychology and “cognitive science.”
In “Learning about Learning,” NCTQ is rating texts used for teacher education and putting everyone on notice that NCTQ intends to rate teacher education texts and programs by the attention given to these six fundamental instructional strategies for learning that all teachers at every level in every subject must use. There is the further implication that these are both necessary and sufficient strategies, meaning anything else is misleading and wasteful of time and effort and money. NCTQ had hired people to conduct line by line “counts” of textbooks to determine their coverage and degree of emphasis on each of these six strategies. Those counts and stack ratings of approved texts and course syllabi are then used to “shame” authors and institutions that include other strategies. What is the connection to this post about Kindergarten testing? Here you go.
Begin quote from Leaning about Learning: p. 26.
Fundamental Instructional Strategies:
Assessing to boost retention.
The adage “use it or lose it” is based on a scientific fact. Every time a person is asked to retrieve information from memory, the retrieved information becomes more cemented in memory. Assessments of any nature — a low-stakes quiz or a high-stakes test, final exam, medical board, bar exam, or driver’s test — are all useful not only to determine if someone knows or has learned material but also to boost learning and retention, especially when hints or prompts are minimized. In addition, timely and substantive feedback on the correct answers reinforces learning. Without this feedback, assessments will strengthen memories of incorrectly remembered information as well as correct information.
Example:
Instructional goal: Ensure that middle-school students retain information learned
in an algebra class
Effective: Assessing frequently, using assessments that force students to recall information on their own, and providing feedback on correct answers.
A teacher who gives weekly quizzes to gauge her students’ progress concentrates on questions about factoring “the difference of two squares” that force students to devise answers with no outside assistance (for example, avoiding multiple-choice questions that minimize recall) and provides feedback on correct answers.
Missing the boat: Not forcing students to recall information on their own and not providing feedback. Missing the boat: A teacher has students answer a question as a class “exit ticket.” Students are allowed to refer to their notes to answer the question, and the teacher does not review the results with the class.
End Quote from Learning about Learning.
Examine the other five strategies. I found only one that did not focus on memorization. There is not an ounce of room for the expression of student “opinions and feelings” in any of these “fundamental” instructional strategies. All are well-suited to training conducted by the teacher (sage on the stage) with the expectation of perfectly compliant students.
NCTQ’s next ratings for teacher education programs will fault programs that do not include and focus only on these six strategies. I kid you not. All other views about learning are effectively demeaned by this warmed over 1950s set of training strategies.
NCTQ’s ratings of teacher education have no methodological merit, they are based on ideology, spurious claims about sound data and scientific proofs, and published in US News and World Report. The ratings are incorporated in an online version intended to steer prospective teachers to programs that match NCTQ’s idea of best bang for the buck.
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I do assiduously read all that you post, Laura, but it seldom fails to depress me. ☹️
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I think what NCTQ claims here is true. Cognitive science supports frequent quizzing to induce the brain to transfer knowledge from short-term to long-term memory (Dan Willingham writes about this). Of course if you don’t think transmitting knowledge is important, you won’t support this practice. But I think knowledge is important.
However the standardized tests that Bailey Reimer seems to be conditioning her kindergarteners to adore are NOT the kind of frequent quizzes with immediate feedback that NCTQ advocates here.
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ponderosa,
I don’t think Laura is suggesting that activities requiring students to recall and apply learned skills and facts, sometimes in the form of tests, have no value.
It’s the idea that this type of teaching methodology, of all the many ways that people learn, is the only one with real merit and should be the standard against which all teaching is measured, that, as Laura says, has no merit when used for rating teacher education.
The NCTQ’s criteria for measuring teacher programs reflects the ideology of current school reform, which is data driven, based on outcomes, and dependent on assessments.
Baily Reimer has apparently internalized this ideology. She seems to lack the knowledge and experience to think critically on the subject, which would provide her the opportunity to gain some real insight.
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Jonathan,
You’re right. My bad for not addressing Laura’s main point. However I do think that amid the havoc that “reform” groups like NCTQ are wreaking on us, there are some salutary tidbits. I don’t know about you, but in education school I was indoctrinated in the belief that transmitting knowledge was passe and malpractice (I still remember the phrase “the banking model of education has been discredited.”) This is a false and really pernicious idea –especially for underprivileged kids who don’t get a ton of general knowledge at home. Just because we’re under assault doesn’t mean our profession shouldn’t do any self-examination. There is an smug, stale and error-ridden orthodoxy in our ed schools and I’ll admit I’m happy to see the reformers shaking it up. The orthodoxy holds that we can teach reading, writing and thinking skills independent of teaching knowledge. This is a lie and research does not support it, yet most teachers seem to believe it. I know the reformers have their own smug and error-ridden orthodoxy. Perhaps in the clash of these two orthodoxies, some truth will shake out.
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Reblogged this on Politicians Are Poody Heads and commented:
This is sickening. Kindergartners should not learn to “love testing.” They need to play, they need to grow, and yes, they need to learn to appreciate learning, which includes not just reading and numbers, and pre-reading and pre-math skills and but art, music, PE, and so many other things.
On the other hand, this type of “schooling” will most probably be successful at turning out robots who will mechanically do their jobs and not question authority.
Which may be the point of this whole misguided “method.”
(Well, that, and making sure that companies that make the tests, textbooks, and software used by the schools make money.)
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I am afraid if I read Bailey’s article, I might just throw up!
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This teacher is clearly not a real teacher. Children in Kindergarten need to develop social skills and learn to play with each other. If this woman truly believes that children are in school to love testing, she will not last long as a teacher. This backward thinking is not beneficial to children. It sounds like the type of thinking that is coming from the State testers. Good luck to those children that she believes will be achieving as a result of excessive testing!
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Strange love – Or “how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb”
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