If you think high-stakes testing is doing severe damage to U.S. education you are not alone.
When I retired in 2008, after thirty-three years in the classroom, it seemed I might be crazy. As far as I could tell, high-stakes testing was not improving education. In fact, it appeared to be doing harm.
Eight years later, it seems I wasn’t crazy.
To wrap up 2016, the Badass Teachers
Association (if you haven’t joined you should) posted the following picture on
its Facebook page. It came by way of Ken Previti, an education blogger, himself:
Then Bobby Lee Reuss weighed in, speaking from the heart – speaking, probably, for millions of educators who work with children every day. No doubt, he captures many of the deepest concerns of front line teachers, principals, psychologists, and counselors, as they try to avoid the yawning pitfalls of “school reform.” Like so many who work with children, Reuss wonders if reforms have been driven by fools at the top. Now he fears the new administration in Washington, D.C. could be even worse.
Here’s his (lightly edited) response:
The majority of experienced teachers who actually earned our post-graduate degrees and teaching credentials after having been educated and trained by the Education Departments of real and respected colleges and universities have a justifiably immense trepidation about the nomination of Betsey DeVos and the incoming Trump administration’s orientation and tendencies regarding many aspects of public policy impacting public education. That trepidation is amplified by both his and DeVos’ demonstrated vulnerability to hamartia and hubris in pursuing their goals.
(I’m going to admit right here, I
had to look up “hamartia.” It means “a fatal flaw leading to the downfall of a
tragic hero or heroine.”)
We fear that both DeVos’ and Trump’s approval of the corporatization of education and the proliferation of charter and/or privatized schools will be incalculably detrimental to traditional public school districts and to the education of America’s present and future generations of students. It could be catastrophically much worse than the generally neo-liberal (i.e. moderately conservative/Rockefeller Republican) stances of the previous Administrations.
(Reuss isn’t just knocking Trump and
DeVos. Like many of us, he lived through the bleak years of Arne Duncan’s time
at the U.S. Department of Education, watched No Child Left Behind implemented,
and saw it fail, saw Common Core touted by one set of politicians and demonized
by another, not one of whom seemed to have a clue.)
Reuss continues:
This
is very personal for me; I regretfully retired after 33 years as a high school
Honors/A.P. teacher (British/World and American Lit & Comp) largely because
our budget difficulties in California, combined with the demands and requirements
of the Bush-era NCLB and the Obama Administration’s subsequent modifications of
it, had resulted in the installation of Broad-trained administrators at our D.
O. and at our school sites. Our district pimped itself (proudly) for Broad
grants and spent money on whiz-bang tech panaceas du jour while “streamlining”
instruction via the new standards and application models.
As
a consequential part of the resultant blow-back, our librarian and her aide
were removed from their positions while our school library itself had all of
its books jettisoned as it was converted into a computer lab (the fourth at our
school site). The principal at that time made the observation that the
elimination of the library was no great loss because “....nobody reads books
anymore.” (I had paid for a subscription to The New Yorker and Smithsonian
magazine for the library for a number of years so that my students—and the
student body at large—would have access to such fine periodicals and their
wide-ranging subject matter). Then our Superintendent, the one responsible for
establishing and implementing “the new paradigm,” went to work for the Broad
Academy and turned the district over to one of his (Broad-influenced) lackeys
(who’d been overseeing, among other things, I.T. at the D.O.)
As
a veteran teacher in my field, I felt more and more alienated from my job over
the past twelve years by federal, state, and local diktats that hemmed and
hedged I and my colleagues in to such a degree that we could not give our kids
the sort of education (and the experience of exploration, joy, and creativity)
in our subjects that had worked so well for previous classes over the decades.
Increasingly, I felt like I was being forced into betraying my mission, my
field, my subject, the Humanities in general and my students until I could no
longer stomach being a cog in the new system (and forcing my kids to accept
their roles as cogs in a corporatist-infected and/or privatized perversion of
what public education should be.
If
President-Elect Trump’s and Betsey DeVos’ agenda and proposals are in sympathy,
concord, and support of the corporatists and their allied privateering
privatizers seeking to acquire, absorb, and vampirize public school systems, I
(and numberless infinities of my fellows) dread the depredations that may
further accrue and become established as public policy in whatever is left of
public education during both his and her tenure.
Trump’s
and DeVos’ agenda and proposals seem bound to produce catastrophic results of
greater breadth and magnitude than we have seen yet, perhaps paralleling the
shocking consequences that already have been exposed as results of the
privatization and out-sourcing of prisons over the past several years.
*
Like I said, when I retired in 2008, I thought I must be missing something. I could not fathom what we were gaining by all the “reforms,” by all the billions spent on testing, by all the laws implemented to punish teachers.
It turns out, I’m not alone.
Mr. Reuss is not alone.
I missed this story when it first came out, but millions of teachers are deeply concerned. Perhaps you missed it too, since so many of you would have been busy wrapping up the countless year-end tasks that mark the lives of all good teachers. In May 2016, USA Today published a story with this headline:
Survey: Nearly Half of Teachers Would Quit now for Higher-Paying Job
Based on work done by the Center for Education Policy, and interviews with more than 3,300 teachers, one of the most frightening details came up in the second paragraph, when reporters noted six in ten teachers were losing enthusiasm for their jobs. That response is chilling; but I don’t think anyone can blame teachers. Almost half, 49%, said the stress and disappointments of the job “aren’t really worth it.”
Even worse, it’s not just teachers who suffer – as we hammer children with standardized tests. Jahana Hayes, 2016 National Teacher of the Year, expressed concern. “Every day I see students who are increasingly frustrated because they are excellent students who are productive and active in the school community, yet this may not translate in their standardized test scores,” she wrote in her application for the award.
I decided to check survey results myself. If you think “school reform” has been a disaster, join the crowd.
(It probably should be a mob!)
First, most real educators realize
their voices are ignored at the national level, by arrogant experts:
If you think standardized testing hasn’t helped, test
scores from the Program for International Student Assessment, from the
Scholastic Aptitude Test, and several other measurements show they have not.
