At a time when we are spending more and more taxpayers’ money on standardized tests and technology to enable us to take those standardized tests (and using the results of the tests to determine whether teachers are succeeding), the reformers are not letting a major fact stand in their way- the tests are worthless. During my years as a teacher, I saw far too much time devoted to meetings in which administrators had teachers pore over the results of poorly written standardized tests to determine what they were going to teach and how they were going to teach it. It was time that would have been far more productive had it been used to to work with individual students or fine tune lesson plans.

An article in the Washington Post addresses the problem of educational data:

Standardized tests given to K-12 students are not without merit. They can function as clear indicators of basic academic competencies. And they can play an important role as diagnostic tools. But they capture only a fraction of life in schools. Built almost exclusively around multiple-choice questions, such tests tell us nothing about a student’s ability to think or write or persuade, to perform experiments or conduct research, to paint, or to play an instrument. They provide no insight into a school’s social climate, its academic orientation, or its general culture. And, as any teacher can explain, the testing and accountability movement has also been plagued by a number of unintended consequences. The school curriculum has narrowed. Test-prep now takes up an inordinate amount of instructional time. And teacher autonomy has withered.

Missouri is diving even further into data at all costs with the recent decision by the State Board of Education to not only buy standardized tests from McGraw-Hill, but also to buy the company’s practice tests, called Acuity. It guarantees that Missouri children will spend more and more time compiling more and more useless data, at the expense of learning. We are reaching the point where education will no longer hold any joy for teachers or students, and that’s when the game is over.

Reprinted from The Turner Report, by permission of the author.

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Listening to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, one would think that American schools are bastions of the hard left, education factories that churn out soft-headed liberal ideologues.  But in Standardized Education: Moving America to the Right, Arthur Lieber makes precisely the opposite argument.  Lieber believes that the country’s recent shift to the right can be traced directly to our school’s infatuation with standardized tests and the right wing values they encompass.

There are two central ideas in Standardized Education that serve as bookends of sorts for Lieber’s argument–he introduces them early on and then returns to them in a more concrete way in the third and final section of the book.  First, he believes that one of the most important jobs of a school is the teaching and learning of empathy, the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes.  Second, Lieber asserts that schools must teach critical thinking skills—simply put, students should be sophisticated enough to know when information is misleading so that they can make wise choices and become responsible, active citizens.  These two values (empathy and critical thinking) form the core of Lieber’s educational philosophy.

The problem with the values of empathy and critical thinking, of course, is that they are not easy to quantify–they are not going to show up with a percentile next to them on the next standardized test. Though it would be lovely to be able to brag that your son or daughter is in the 89^th percentile for “bs detection,” critical thinking skills are slippery and do not lend themselves to objective measurement.  But that does not mean they should be dismissed.  Indeed, in the last section of the book Lieber describes how the values of empathy and critical thinking could contribute to the development of a more just, progressive society.  He also goes a step further and describes what this would look like in the classroom.  Teachers have to model empathy and critical thinking, and students have to be offered opportunities to get out of the classroom and into the real world.  It won’t be easy, especially in an era of budget cuts and standardization, for students to be given authentic experiential learning opportunities.  But even though it can be a tough sell in today’s educational environment, Lieber is very persuasive that it’s a goal worth pursuing.

Though Standardized Education is not a lengthy book, it is a nuanced one that avoids some of the good versus evil dichotomies that you so often find in other education books.  The book’s treatment of teachers offers an excellent example of this.  Too often in books about the American educational system teachers are portrayed as either heroic victims of a dysfunctional system or, in the other extreme, as lazy incompetents biding their time until their cushy pension comes due.  For Lieber, though, teachers are just human beings.  Some are poor teachers, teachers who care only about their test scores and have forgotten what it was like to be a student stuck in a classroom filling in mindless worksheets.  Others are creative, bright individuals who manage despite considerable odds to make their classroom a place for high energy learning.  In Lieber’s view, teachers are human beings who have very difficult jobs to do, and some of them have the grace and stamina to do it well, while others do not.

Similarly, Lieber looks upon both Democrats and Republicans with a critical eye in Standardized Education.  Make no mistake about it, Lieber is arguing for an educational system that imbues its students with more progressive values, but he is quick to point out that Democrats as well as Republicans are standing in the way of that happening because of the bipartisan embrace of the almighty standardized tests.  Standardized tests, as evidenced by Bush’s No Child Left Behind program and Obama’s Race to the Top, are the true villains of Lieber’s book.  The problem with standardized tests, he asserts, is that they value number-crunching over the living, breathing students in the classroom, and they embrace a conservative value of competition as the key barometer to a person’s value as a human being.   Standardized tests, then, both reflect and reinforce a morally bankrupt Republican ethos:  Just as conservative Republicanism supports a status quo in which competition allows only for the survival of the fittest (empathy and compassion be damned) so too does an educational climate where standardized tests reign supreme. Taken as a whole, Standardized Education is a meditation on how the American educational system went wrong, but it is also a call to action, a road map for how to transform American schools into places where democratic, progressive values are embraced.

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I taught sixth grade in a local public middle school for six years.  It was a struggling, blue-collar district.  My students’ parents did not have a college education, often worked minimum wage jobs, and at times had unstable home lives.  But it was a great job—the district was racially diverse, my colleagues were terrific, and the parents were generally very supportive.  The students, though sometimes very challenging, had an unguarded charm all their own.

Teaching is tough, and anyone who’s been a student knows there are many bad teachers out there.  In recent years more and more politicians are calling for teachers to be evaluated more stringently based on the standardized test scores of their students, and it’s easy to see the appeal of this.  After all, it’s “hard” data—we can analyze percentiles, look for movement in grade equivalencies, disaggregate by subgroup, and make “objective” assessments of which teachers are failing and which are succeeding.  But anyone who has actually been in the trenches teaching in a classroom can tell you why using standardized tests to evaluate teachers is problematic at best and truly dangerous when taken to the extreme.

Teaching vs. testing

The most obvious problem with relying on standardized tests to evaluate teachers is that it operates on the premise that everything that happens in my classroom can be quantified into a tidy formula that can calculate my success as a teacher (or, in the case of proposed merit pay systems, how much my paycheck should be).  Much of what teachers do all day is valuable work that won’t raise the students’ composite percentile one point.

My students generally did very well on standardized tests, but I can think of many instances when the work I did with a student didn’t have an immediate impact on test scores, but definitely made a difference a couple years down the line.

I had a student named Brandon [not his real name], for example, who came into my sixth grade classroom with an extremely negative attitude towards authority in general and teachers in particular.  I worked every day for nine months for him to feel like I was an ally and wanted him to do well.  He did manage to pick up a book now and then, but the main transformation for Brandon was that by the end of the school, year he felt like school was a place where he was welcome.  In seventh grade, Brandon’s academics really took off; he began actually turning in assignments and mastering the material.  The groundwork for this turnaround was laid in 6^th grade, but it took a while (and the continued hard work of his 7^th grade teachers obviously) for this to happen.

Inciting unhealthy competition among teachers

The more insidious problem with using test scores to evaluate teachers is that it pits teachers against one another and encourages unhealthy competition in precisely the environment where collaboration and cooperation should be flourishing.  At my school, charts were routinely distributed at faculty meetings showing each teachers’ students’ scores on the latest round of benchmark assessments or standardized tests.  This meant public humiliation for the teachers at the bottom of that list, the clear implication being not that your students were struggling but that you as a teacher weren’t cutting it.  None of us wanted to be at the bottom of that list, and it was easy to resent the teachers who were at the top of it.  This obviously bred a competitive environment where teachers were a little reluctant to share fresh ideas and pass along test preparation methods that seemed to actually work.  If you wanted your students to have the top scores so you could earn the professional  kudos that went with that, you went about your work quietly and weren’t quick to collaborate with your colleagues on new lessons.  I can only imagine how much more chillingly competitive things would be if teachers’ salary was based primarily on students’ test scores.

The risk for at-risk students

Finally, in a competitive system where teachers’ evaluations are based in large part on their students’ test scores, it’s the at-risk students who lose the most.  Put simply, it creates an environment where teachers will do anything in their power to get rid of students that will hurt their scores.  This kind of (to put it crudely) “pass the trash” mentality already exists, but if teachers are given a professional incentive to do it, it will become much more widespread.

In the six years that I taught, I had many students who were a drain on my energy and who I knew were not likely to perform well on the end of the year tests.  Often these were also students who disrupted the learning of others.  All teachers have these kinds of kids in their rooms, and the right response, I think, is to not give up on them, but to doggedly work to minimize their negative impact on the class and maximize their potential.  But if my contract renewal depended on my students’ test scores, I would be very tempted to do just about everything in my power to have that student transferred to another teacher, sent to the office a lot, or (what goes on a lot) spend their days sitting in the hallway.  In other words, I’d be tempted to cut my losses with that student and concentrate on the other students.  I doubt that’s the kind of social Darwinism we want going on in our public schools, but that’s exactly what is encouraged by high stakes standardized testing.

Quality, not quantity

Not all efforts to hold teachers accountable for the job they are doing are bad—teachers should be evaluated, and crummy teachers who show inclination toward improvement should be dismissed.  Standardized tests might even be a very small part of such an evaluation.  But the power these tests wield now in the lives of teachers and students is completely out of proportion to their value.  A teacher should be evaluated by administrators, fellow teachers, parents, and students, and there should be a real effort to do the hard business of qualitative rather than merely quantitative evaluation.  Teaching isn’t just a science, after all.  It’s an art, too.  Anyone who’s ever sat in a classroom with an amazing teacher knows that—and it might not show up in her MAP scores.

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