Cover Photo by Mark R. Day

Saturday, March 1, 2014

Letter: On the Topic of Standardized testing

2/28/14
Nichole,
     I sometimes wonder if the entire program of testing will not destroy Public Education.   The implementation of "No Child Left Behind" and its derivatives has led us to the brink of  a total collapse when it comes to providing a real educational experience for children.  I continuously hear people talking about rigor, blooms, and higher level thinking to solve problems  but  their concept of rigor and higher level thinking is short sighted and tied to a plethora of often disassociated specific facts, which are tested with multiple choice questions.  We are led to believe these test questions  are analytical because they require the student to apply facts to answer them but that seems a thin argument for this sort of high stakes testing.  Please allow me one final observation about the testing, I believe that the questions, which are purchased from private test writing firms, can be arbitrary and in some cases biased. 
     As for the testing strategy and the constant revision of the tests themselves, I ask the following: Why is it that just when the students begin to master that kind of testing, the politicians and the want-a-be academic administers up the ante and change the testing.  The question, I ask myself when testing changes take place is;  "If we are currently testing for higher level comprehension and the students are being successful why are we changing the testing?"  The answer, that always comes to my mind is, "Damn the students are doing so well, we will need to increase the level of difficulty until we can prove our hypothesis, that the students are not do well.  Now does that sound like a progressive and scientific approach to identifying success?
     In today's Data driven world politicians need to point to data charts and make absolute judgments based on the outcome of testing programs.  I find this ridiculous and dangerous because we place to much value on a momentary snap shot of the student's ability and we pile far to much pressure on our children. 
     Students are  children who have differences  in rates of maturity, economic and social success, and most overlooked is the fact, that they are still developing mentally.  We are eating our young, so to speak, by using a system that is designed to find failure and begin the process of labeling and sorting children into categories. 
      So back to my original rant, the system is designed to fail because it treat students as a raw material without flaws or faults and attempts to turn them all into perfect machine tools who will have been educated enough to fit into the American business machine.  However, that will never really happen because the people, in the system of education, both students and teachers are human beings and not precision parts nor perfect material that will always fit the machine parameters.  Education should not be designed to produce interchangeable parts that can be propelled down an assembly line and mass produced for consumption by corporations. Education is the process of discovering the talents of individuals and directing those talents into useful skills. 
     Perhaps every politician should be forced to watch the silent movie Metropolis or read Brave New World.  Human beings are unique and talented in dissimilar ways.  The current changes in our traditional classical education system seek  to create Drone's who are able to fulfill the needs of a hierarchical order and it fail to seek the full potential of each student based on the talents and skills they possess.
 
Mark
 
This letter was originally posted as a comment on facebook in response to a posting written by a friend who is also a teacher.

No comments:

Post a Comment