Letter on Testing to Superintendent of Schools in Bangor, Maine
TO TEST OR NOT TO TEST; TO BORE OR TO INSPIRE
It was with considerable interest that I read in the "Communique" of your visit to Washington, DC, for the NCLB conference. I hope you keep in mind the political ramifications of the NCLB. As any retiring White House staffer will tell you, every decision made in the White House is a political decision. No one asks,"Is this good for the children?" or "Will this improve learning in the schools?" The question asked is "How will this keep us in power and provide profits for our supporters?"
The political agenda , of course, is to privatize the schools in the same way the White House hopes to privatize Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. Just as they are working on privatizing more prisons and the military. And their political agenda is very transparent. As Grover Norquist, one of Bush’s top advisers, says.""My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." And as schools are a wing of the government that means education as we know it.
Rod Paige said that testing will solve the problem of students’ not learning...How preposterous. In the United States students from rich families and neighborhoods do well in school; students from poor families and neighborhoods don’t do so well. When we were constructing a testing program for students in Freeport, Maine, in the 1980's we sought advice from two professional test makers. They told us that if we spent more than 15 minutes analyzing test results that we were wasting our time.
And those were the day when Eve Bither was the head of the Department of Education in Augusta. She often said that the standarized tests that the state was touting would "never be used to compare one school with another." Guess what? You betcha...
In 1968 Dan Fader, the author of "Hooked On Books" a book that revolutionized the teaching of reading and writing in Maine, spoke at the teachers’ convention in Westbrook. He said when lawyers and doctors present papers at their conventions all hell breaks out if someone presents a wacky idea. At teachers’ conventions all papers and ideas no matter how absurd are accepted as being valid. He said the applause you hear at teachers’ conventions is the banging of sheeps’ tails against the back of the chairs. That was back in the days when teachers were called teachers; not "suspected pedophiles" or that most high fallutin of all appellations "educators."
As for the Republicans’ concern about education...here is a partial list of programs that Bush announced today that he wants cut or eliminated.
Education Department
Comprehensive School Reform
Educational Technology State Grants
Even Start
(High School Program Terminations:)
Vocational Education State Grants
Vocational Education National Activities
Tech Prep State Grants
Upward Bound
Talent Search
GEAR UP
Smaller Learning Communities
Perkins Loans: Capital Contributions and Loan Cancellations
Regional Education Laboratories
Safe and Drug Free Schools State Grants
(Small Elementary and Secondary Education Programs:)
Javits Gifted and Talented Education
National Writing Project
School Leadership
Dropout Prevention Program
Close Up Fellowships
Ready to Teach
Parental Information and Resource Centers
Alcohol Abuse Reduction
Foundations for Learning
Mental Health Integration in Schools
Community Technology Centers
Exchanges with Historic Whaling and Trading Partners
Foreign Language Assistance
Excellence in Economic Education
Arts in Education
Women's Educational Equity
Elementary and Secondary School Counseling
Civic Education
Star Schools
(Smaller Higher Education Programs:)
Higher Education Demos for Students w/Disabilities
Underground Railroad Program
Interest Subsidy Grants
(Small Job Training and Adult Education Programs:)
Occupational and Employment Information
Tech-prep Demonstration
Literacy Programs for Prisoners
State Grants for Incarcerated Youth
(Small Postsecondary Student Financial Assistance Programs:)
LEAP
Byrd Scholarships
B.J. Stupak Olympic Scholarships
The tone of the article about your conference implies that you and the other administrators are going to keep a critical eye on the pronouncements from Washington, and you are to be congratulated for that.
Below is an article that was published in the Bangor Daily News a few years ago. It still is true today. The article also appears on PBS’ "Frontline" website.
******************
Having taught school in Maine and New Hampshire for 28 years, I have seen "educational" fads come and go; Transformational Grammar, The New Math, Back to Basics, Behavioral Objectives, Values Education, Career Education, Character Education(touted by William Bennett; so much for that) , and now the Learning Results and the High-Stakes-Testing movements. Like the proverbial bad penny these fads come and go. Some come back around every 4 years; some reappear every 8 years; some die a nice quiet death. That’s what I hope will happen with the latest testing craze. After all, testing merely tells us what we already know; the poor are not learning. Across the country, the percentage of students who don’t do well in school is the same percentage of students who are eligible for free lunches.
The current vision is a business model: specific objectives are set; performance is measured; teachers and students will be held accountable. "Names will be taken; butts will be kicked." How can teachers be held accountable for those things that they have no control over? Teachers have no control over students’ genetics, nutrition, nurturing, television watching, school attendance, or emotional and physical well-being. Yet teachers are going to be held accountable for the success of students on some politically motivated, huge profits driven, time consuming, unreliable test?
And that’s just one reason we should oppose the current testing mania. Tests don’t solve any of education’s problems. Issues such as school funding, creative curriculum development, and student participation in their own learning are taking a back seat to testing. Creativity, conceptual thinking, and curiosity can’t be measure by standardized tests. Tests can measure isolated skills, specific facts, and trivia. As Albert Einstein said, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."If testing were the answer to solving our schools’ problems, these problems would have been solved years ago.
Tests stop real learning. Test companies are inaccurate and lax in their security. Tests are a waste of money and valuable time. In the year 2001 the states collectively spent more than $400 million to test students. At 17 hours long, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment test is longer than the Massachusetts bar exam. Tests place too much emphasis on a single examination. Tests turn schools into stock markets where students are only numbers, teacher are merely technicians, and schools are factories. Tests prepare students for the dull lock-step jobs offered in a global economy.
The more-testing-is-better movement meets the needs of the corporations not the hope and dreams of our young people. Success in the global economy requires a docile populace, obedient unskilled workers who are afraid to organize and who will settle for less than what their parents had.
If students are convinced that they are failures because they didn’t pass the "test", they will blame themselves for not doing better. They will work for minimum wage as hamburger flippers and big box store clerks.
Since the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) tests went into effect, dropout rates in some schools have soared to over 75%; the average for the state of Texas is 40%. In Texas, 25% of minority high school freshmen are retained, and 98% of those retained drop out before their senior year. But Texas needs thousands of fast food servers and stock yard workers, so it’s OK. Texas is, also, one of a number of states where education is driven by companies like McGraw-Hill, a major producer of text-books, test prep materials, and tests.
Reading and writing should be natural, joyful, rewarding activities. Constant testing turns these activities into school subjects. Testing writing in the third grade by looking for misspelled words or grammatical errors is the antithesis of what school should be about. Testing spelling is not testing writing. If kids learned to play baseball the way standardized testing demands they be taught, no one would play ball. We would have them measure the length of the bat, count off the feet to first base, and practice filling out score cards . We can help our young people to take the road of creativity, real literacy, conceptual thinking, and individuality, or we can take them down the path of mindless drill and repetition and memorization of isolated facts .
Parents, students, school principals, and teachers in a number of states including Massachusetts, Florida, California, Texas, Washington, Illinois, and have formed organization demanding an end to the standardized testing. . MaineRefusal is a group advocating the boycott and abolition of standardized testing. Teachers in Texas are keeping their own children home on TAAS day. In New York 2/3 of an eighth grade class in one school boycotted the tests. A second grader at Martin Elementary School in South San Francisco got so nervous about taking the Stanford-9 test that he threw up on his exam. A fitting response to a test that requests the regurgitation of trivia.
Teachers in Maine are the finest in the country. They are dancing as fast as they can preparing their lessons, wiping noses, mediating student conflicts, attending endless committee meetings, watching the kids on the playground, paying for supplies out of their own pockets, grading papers, motivating, encouraging, and educating our young people. Let’s support them in that effort. I encourage everyone to log on to FairTest, Rethinking Schools, MassRefusal, PencilDown, NoMoreTests, and other web sites relating to this issue. Let’s make sure that we are doing the best we can for our young people.
Gerald Oleson is a retired school teacher, poet, educational consultant, and independent peace and justice activist.
He is the year 2004 winner of the Roger Baldwin Award presented by the Maine Civil Liberties Union for his efforts in advancing civil liberties in the State of Maine.
It was with considerable interest that I read in the "Communique" of your visit to Washington, DC, for the NCLB conference. I hope you keep in mind the political ramifications of the NCLB. As any retiring White House staffer will tell you, every decision made in the White House is a political decision. No one asks,"Is this good for the children?" or "Will this improve learning in the schools?" The question asked is "How will this keep us in power and provide profits for our supporters?"
The political agenda , of course, is to privatize the schools in the same way the White House hopes to privatize Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. Just as they are working on privatizing more prisons and the military. And their political agenda is very transparent. As Grover Norquist, one of Bush’s top advisers, says.""My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." And as schools are a wing of the government that means education as we know it.
Rod Paige said that testing will solve the problem of students’ not learning...How preposterous. In the United States students from rich families and neighborhoods do well in school; students from poor families and neighborhoods don’t do so well. When we were constructing a testing program for students in Freeport, Maine, in the 1980's we sought advice from two professional test makers. They told us that if we spent more than 15 minutes analyzing test results that we were wasting our time.
And those were the day when Eve Bither was the head of the Department of Education in Augusta. She often said that the standarized tests that the state was touting would "never be used to compare one school with another." Guess what? You betcha...
In 1968 Dan Fader, the author of "Hooked On Books" a book that revolutionized the teaching of reading and writing in Maine, spoke at the teachers’ convention in Westbrook. He said when lawyers and doctors present papers at their conventions all hell breaks out if someone presents a wacky idea. At teachers’ conventions all papers and ideas no matter how absurd are accepted as being valid. He said the applause you hear at teachers’ conventions is the banging of sheeps’ tails against the back of the chairs. That was back in the days when teachers were called teachers; not "suspected pedophiles" or that most high fallutin of all appellations "educators."
As for the Republicans’ concern about education...here is a partial list of programs that Bush announced today that he wants cut or eliminated.
Education Department
Comprehensive School Reform
Educational Technology State Grants
Even Start
(High School Program Terminations:)
Vocational Education State Grants
Vocational Education National Activities
Tech Prep State Grants
Upward Bound
Talent Search
GEAR UP
Smaller Learning Communities
Perkins Loans: Capital Contributions and Loan Cancellations
Regional Education Laboratories
Safe and Drug Free Schools State Grants
(Small Elementary and Secondary Education Programs:)
Javits Gifted and Talented Education
National Writing Project
School Leadership
Dropout Prevention Program
Close Up Fellowships
Ready to Teach
Parental Information and Resource Centers
Alcohol Abuse Reduction
Foundations for Learning
Mental Health Integration in Schools
Community Technology Centers
Exchanges with Historic Whaling and Trading Partners
Foreign Language Assistance
Excellence in Economic Education
Arts in Education
Women's Educational Equity
Elementary and Secondary School Counseling
Civic Education
Star Schools
(Smaller Higher Education Programs:)
Higher Education Demos for Students w/Disabilities
Underground Railroad Program
Interest Subsidy Grants
(Small Job Training and Adult Education Programs:)
Occupational and Employment Information
Tech-prep Demonstration
Literacy Programs for Prisoners
State Grants for Incarcerated Youth
(Small Postsecondary Student Financial Assistance Programs:)
LEAP
Byrd Scholarships
B.J. Stupak Olympic Scholarships
The tone of the article about your conference implies that you and the other administrators are going to keep a critical eye on the pronouncements from Washington, and you are to be congratulated for that.
Below is an article that was published in the Bangor Daily News a few years ago. It still is true today. The article also appears on PBS’ "Frontline" website.
******************
Having taught school in Maine and New Hampshire for 28 years, I have seen "educational" fads come and go; Transformational Grammar, The New Math, Back to Basics, Behavioral Objectives, Values Education, Career Education, Character Education(touted by William Bennett; so much for that) , and now the Learning Results and the High-Stakes-Testing movements. Like the proverbial bad penny these fads come and go. Some come back around every 4 years; some reappear every 8 years; some die a nice quiet death. That’s what I hope will happen with the latest testing craze. After all, testing merely tells us what we already know; the poor are not learning. Across the country, the percentage of students who don’t do well in school is the same percentage of students who are eligible for free lunches.
The current vision is a business model: specific objectives are set; performance is measured; teachers and students will be held accountable. "Names will be taken; butts will be kicked." How can teachers be held accountable for those things that they have no control over? Teachers have no control over students’ genetics, nutrition, nurturing, television watching, school attendance, or emotional and physical well-being. Yet teachers are going to be held accountable for the success of students on some politically motivated, huge profits driven, time consuming, unreliable test?
And that’s just one reason we should oppose the current testing mania. Tests don’t solve any of education’s problems. Issues such as school funding, creative curriculum development, and student participation in their own learning are taking a back seat to testing. Creativity, conceptual thinking, and curiosity can’t be measure by standardized tests. Tests can measure isolated skills, specific facts, and trivia. As Albert Einstein said, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."If testing were the answer to solving our schools’ problems, these problems would have been solved years ago.
Tests stop real learning. Test companies are inaccurate and lax in their security. Tests are a waste of money and valuable time. In the year 2001 the states collectively spent more than $400 million to test students. At 17 hours long, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment test is longer than the Massachusetts bar exam. Tests place too much emphasis on a single examination. Tests turn schools into stock markets where students are only numbers, teacher are merely technicians, and schools are factories. Tests prepare students for the dull lock-step jobs offered in a global economy.
The more-testing-is-better movement meets the needs of the corporations not the hope and dreams of our young people. Success in the global economy requires a docile populace, obedient unskilled workers who are afraid to organize and who will settle for less than what their parents had.
If students are convinced that they are failures because they didn’t pass the "test", they will blame themselves for not doing better. They will work for minimum wage as hamburger flippers and big box store clerks.
Since the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) tests went into effect, dropout rates in some schools have soared to over 75%; the average for the state of Texas is 40%. In Texas, 25% of minority high school freshmen are retained, and 98% of those retained drop out before their senior year. But Texas needs thousands of fast food servers and stock yard workers, so it’s OK. Texas is, also, one of a number of states where education is driven by companies like McGraw-Hill, a major producer of text-books, test prep materials, and tests.
Reading and writing should be natural, joyful, rewarding activities. Constant testing turns these activities into school subjects. Testing writing in the third grade by looking for misspelled words or grammatical errors is the antithesis of what school should be about. Testing spelling is not testing writing. If kids learned to play baseball the way standardized testing demands they be taught, no one would play ball. We would have them measure the length of the bat, count off the feet to first base, and practice filling out score cards . We can help our young people to take the road of creativity, real literacy, conceptual thinking, and individuality, or we can take them down the path of mindless drill and repetition and memorization of isolated facts .
Parents, students, school principals, and teachers in a number of states including Massachusetts, Florida, California, Texas, Washington, Illinois, and have formed organization demanding an end to the standardized testing. . MaineRefusal is a group advocating the boycott and abolition of standardized testing. Teachers in Texas are keeping their own children home on TAAS day. In New York 2/3 of an eighth grade class in one school boycotted the tests. A second grader at Martin Elementary School in South San Francisco got so nervous about taking the Stanford-9 test that he threw up on his exam. A fitting response to a test that requests the regurgitation of trivia.
Teachers in Maine are the finest in the country. They are dancing as fast as they can preparing their lessons, wiping noses, mediating student conflicts, attending endless committee meetings, watching the kids on the playground, paying for supplies out of their own pockets, grading papers, motivating, encouraging, and educating our young people. Let’s support them in that effort. I encourage everyone to log on to FairTest, Rethinking Schools, MassRefusal, PencilDown, NoMoreTests, and other web sites relating to this issue. Let’s make sure that we are doing the best we can for our young people.
Gerald Oleson is a retired school teacher, poet, educational consultant, and independent peace and justice activist.
He is the year 2004 winner of the Roger Baldwin Award presented by the Maine Civil Liberties Union for his efforts in advancing civil liberties in the State of Maine.
posted by Rev. G. | 12:37 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home