It’s easy to think of things our kids would be better off doing. Playing in the spring sunshine. Planting a garden. Burying their heads in books. Practicing jump shots. Catching frogs. Learning reading, writing and arithmetic. Learning Urdu. Learning anything.
The tests are a time suck for teachers, too. They’ll be watching over spiritless and possibly anxious classrooms of test-taking students when they should be, crazy thought here, teaching. We should want our schools alive — with passion and joy, with laughter and curiosity, with play and learning.
Maybe that sounds too romantic for this grim, hard-headed age. Shouldn’t we insist that our children line up for the rat race and defeat their rivals from around the globalized economy?
Even if we swallow that baloney, there’s remarkably little evidence that the national rise of high-stakes standardized testing has done anything to improve schools and learning. As far as I can tell, the only beneficiaries are the big bureaucracies that want more control over classrooms and the big corporations that provide the tests.
The tests certainly haven’t benefited our kids, who, in many districts, are getting shorter recesses so teachers can spend more time in service to the looming tests. Or who, as many parents can attest, view testing days with anxiety and dread.
If the tests were just tests, they might be relatively harmless. But they epitomize something bigger: The madness that applies a production mentality to education. Everything can be neatly quantified, yes siree, not to mention automated, regulated and homogenized!
But children aren’t widgets and schools aren’t factories. You can’t measure the success of a classroom with data points. Standardized testing tells us nothing important about how children experience school.
Tests can’t tell us if Mr. Jones is a much-needed role model for fatherless boys. They can’t tell us how much Mrs. Riley cares for her fourth-graders. They can’t tell us if Ms. Hughes’ eighth-graders feel supported or inspired. They can’t tell us if Mr. Hernandez is changing lives.
All of which illustrates why tying teacher evaluations (and salaries) to test scores is so hideously ludicrous. Such a system rewards an uninspired teacher who devotes every depressing classroom minute to dreary test prep, and it punishes the impassioned teacher who refuses to teach for the test but instead imbues children with a love of learning.
There are other problems. Tests designed by upper-middle-class professionals will, surprise surprise, inherently reward the children of upper-middle-class professionals. Schools attended by poor kids get labeled underperforming or even failing. But lower test scores often result from that very poverty. A child who knows violence, hunger or fear at home won’t do as well on a standardized test, and it’s unfair to expect even a great teacher to overcome that.
Let’s pause here to give the opt-out movement a sincere and robust round of applause. Clap, clap, clap, clap.
The parents who hold their children out of testing — about 20 percent of the statewide total in recent years — are expressing healthy rebellion against the production approach to education. They’re standing up to the consultants and “experts” who claim to know what’s best for kids but prove again and again they don’t. They are saying no to an impersonal education bureaucracy with a vested interest in getting bigger and silencing parental voices.
Clearly, the opt-out movement has been a tremendous success. It has forced New York to back off its testing regime, at least a little. The time devoted to testing students in grades 3 through 8, for example, has been reduced from six days annually to four, including the two days of math testing that begin Tuesday.
Meanwhile, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has seemingly shelved his proposal that test scores account for 50 percent of teacher evaluations; the opt-out rebellion put that bad idea on ice. Now, the state Assembly is even considering a bill that would end test-based teacher evaluations altogether.
New York should go further. It should altogether eliminate standardized testing in elementary and middle schools.
Doing so would be a step toward rejecting the insidious idea that education should be evermore standardized. It would bring more local control of schools. It would help recognize what should be obvious: Real teaching can’t be homogenized, because every child learns differently. It’s an inherently individualized process.
As most every parent and teacher knows, learning is about small moments and quiet victories. It’s about relationships built on trust and even love. My God, is there anything more personal or magical or maybe even divine than teaching a small child to read?
There are things that can be measured. Teaching and caring for children are not among them.
cchurchill@timesunion.com • 518-454-5442 • @chris_churchill
