Between Standardized Testing and a Hard Place

I wrote this several months ago regarding the state of education in this country. It's a topic that I'm particularly interested in, given my profession. It reads a bit like a manifesto, but I suppose that is the way of it.

This is an open letter to public educators, parents, staff, students, private educators, scholars, employees of any town, and all of humanity in general. The message I am going to speak is important enough that if you are capable of processing the words that I have written here, you are my audience. If you were taught, at some point in your life, to realize that the stark black marks upon the page have meaning beyond their appearance, you are my audience. 

I write to you because we are in great danger, every single one of us - Not from the current and tenuous position we as a country hold in the world, not from the economy, and not from the hundreds of other very real threats we face. The danger I am speaking of is far more fundamental, far more central to the core of our beliefs as a community of intelligent, thinking citizens. I speak to you today of the erosion of the public education system, and I will say many things. Not all of you will be happy, and many of you will react in the ways that have become second nature to you now when you hear my words. Skepticism, doubt, fear, anger, distrust; these are the things what I say will undoubtedly be met with. Know that I do not blame you. I am not apart from you. I hear the lies of the politicians, those in power, as well as you do. We have every right to be skeptical. Do not turn your skepticism into deafness, though. When you stop listening, you stop thinking.

I write to you because we are in great danger as a people, and I write because we as a people, are posing a danger. Education as we know it is under attack from many angles, and the time has past for someone to stand up and say something, anything, to get people to look at all of the issues that need to be discussed. The time for passive "chat" is over. The time for meetings is over. The time for focus groups is over. Look at what we have created, audience, and realize that we need to change now. That change must come from all points, or none. There is no middle ground anymore.

I am a teacher. Those words should be filled with pride, and in the occupation and its great history I have nothing but. All too often, however, I have seen the attacks coming. I am going to share the with you, and let you make up your own minds. In the end, the most powerful thing any of us have is our ability to think, reason, and ultimately, to effect change.

The culture of schooling has changed. Older teachers remember the days when it seemed that parents and the community came into schools with solutions, with open arms, and engaged in a partnership. On the whole, parents would work with teachers, and see them as allies. Not only allies in getting their children through the school, and enriching their lives with learning, but as functioning and skilled members of the community. Over the recent years, that has changed. No group is blameless, and no group deserves all of the blame. Parents, your jobs are hard, and no one denies that. No one denies that your children are special, and that each one of them has something to contribute to school and the society at large. Teachers, no one doubts that your jobs are hard, and no one denies that you have a great many children to work with at any given moment. Both sides must realize that they are not being persecuted, and that belief must be grounded in reality. Parents, I appeal to you in this, see the danger we are in. We are not after your children, and you can trust what is said. Is a wonderful, productive, and mutually beneficial year with your child's teacher not worth the risk of a poor grade on a homework? A quiz? A test? Educators strive on a daily basis to be as fair as they possibly can, and no one is seeking to harm your child. You do not need to battle for every grade, because you are fighting for something empty. I know it is difficult to fight the fiction, but you are not fighting for something real when you demand an A rather than a B. You are fighting for the self-same marks on paper I described early, you are not fighting what is behind them. If a student does not know something, then you are not fighting their ignorance by fighting for a different grade. You are not combatting their lack of knowledge, you are merely combatting the mark that is written on a piece of paper. That is a hollow victory, if it could be called a victory at all. As I'm positive you as intelligent people can see, the propagation of ignorance is not a victory, but a tragic low-note in the history of humanity.

To continue, upon the idea of the benefits outweighing the cost, I am forced to ask a painful question. I know that parents, students, everyone want the best for the children of our society, of our world. Does it not become incumbent upon us as responsible adults to prepare them for it? Too many structures exist in our schools and in our educational system that have become abused, and denigrated to the point of near uselessness. We are attempting to prepare students for the real world, the world where jobs will not ask for accommodations, where professors will not put homework up in twenty different locations to make sure students get it. We are attempting to prepare them for a world where strangers on the bus will be eating peanuts, and where the doctors we visit will be using latex gloves. We are attempting to prepare them for a real world where sometimes there is only one chance. Sometimes the stakes are high, and sometimes there is no such thing as a retake, regardless of need. We have to stop the tide of accommodations in the schools as knee-jerk reactions to a problem, and think about their global impact. The more we create, the more we follow, the more we take away from our collective ability to handle the real issues, the dramatic ones that must be handled. I veer towards ideas that some are not comfortable with, but I am not writing to comfort you. I am writing to make everyone see what is happening, and we must all think about it before it becomes too late for the system to be saved. Rethink IEPs. Rethink restrictions. Rethink accommodations. Risks are something we should educate about, not insulate against. If we insulate against every risk, we create a society of people who will one day make decisions regarding our lives who are incapable of handling the responsibility.

Responsibility. It is a word that I used moments ago as a concept that I assumed all of my readers had a fundamental understanding of. Look around though, especially if you are a parent and are reading this within eyeshot of your children. Am I right? Should I assume that responsibility still holds the sway and power that it once did? There will always be those who buck responsibility, but it is becoming moment by moment, day by day, something that is far more systemic. Multiple redundancies, technology, and the increased dependency upon "retakes," "extra credit," and "excused absences," are making responsibility at best difficult to acquire and at worst unneccessary. Our children are smart. Our children are talented. Our children are, however, above and beyond all else, human. If they see an opportunity to do a little work, and get the greatest possible gain, they will do that bare minimum. Our urgings, our statements of what they should want to do come across as nothing but meaninglessly pedantic gestures. To say that a student wants to be "independent" in one breath, then excuse their absences and missing homework with a note in the next is an empty gesture, and the two ideas are so opposite one another that they becoming meaningless.

On the subject of teachers, we must realize that we are not blameless in this issue either. We took a responsibility, and I might argue a sacred responsibility when we took this job. We agreed that for a portion of the young people in this country's life, we would watch over them and act as their stewards in their quest for education and knowledge. We must recognize that there cannot be an "us against them" mentality. Ever. We must listen to the students we are responsible for, we must hear them, and we must know everything about them. To paraphrase from an inspirational pamphlet I once read, it is our interpretation, and it is our values that give meaning to those marks on paper. We make an "A" an "A" and we can just as easily make a "C" feel like an "A" and a "B" feel like a "D." That is power that is not invested in the letter, the letter is meaningless. It is our decisions, and the values we place on them that make them meaningful. We must stop thinking of the letters and the numbers as the sum total of scholastic life. The numbers and the letters are but a small portion in the overall picture. 

The matter of numbers must force our attention to another topic, one that should be just as frightening as some of the other items I have mentioned. It goes by many names - "high stakes testing," "MCAS," "Standardized Testing," but every name suggests the same thing - an objective measure of student performance. I am not writing today with a political agenda to remove this type of testing. I think that like everything in education it requires a balance to look at its meaning. There are those, and we all know them, who frantically run to the grade reports when they are published and hunt through surrounding towns to see how "we" compared to "them." I say to you that that action is depraved, in ways that should terrify you to the core. You wish to gloat, or fear, the success or failure of another town, of other children? The only reason they are not your own children is because they are some miles apart. We need to look at those numbers as a part in a bigger picture. They are not, nor should they ever be, akin to the sports scores in a local paper. That is a travesty that should never be allowed by a thinking populace. 

There are other issues, to be certain, but my job is drawing to an end here. Yours is just beginning. Do not clip this out of a newspaper. Do not email it to others. Do not read it to your friends, colleagues, or neighbours unless you are prepared to act. Unless you are prepared to stop being a part of the undifferentiated, the uncaring, the mass of people who think this "isn't their problem," you have no business continuing this document. For those of you that are with me, those of you who believe that it is time for a change, and that it is a change we can accomplish, then start today. Start now, and commit to the process. We will see that change that we want.