Organized Chaos wrote about testing and got me thinking …
Imagine in the corporate world having to do or be the target of work performance reviews each month.
It would be hard to get any work done. In private business, such a mis-step by HR would be easily fixed. One would just go to the CEO, explain this is a distraction to the real business at hand, negatively impacting sales, production and R&D. The CEO would put a stop to it or at least limit it to once a year.
Now imagine a CEO who got his money from the State based on these performance reviews. This means the performance reviews were the business at hand, because let’s face it, money is the mover in organizations, not policy and mission statements.
NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND: No Child Left Behind uses this type of incentive system in Education.
The current Department of Education received $44 Billion in Stimulus funds, which it tied directly to standardized testing results. School systems must perform on standardized testing to get funded.
In an average Title One school the following testing schedule is required:
1st Quarter:
DRA2 Word Analysis
Name ID
Writing Sample (scored)
KMRA (3 different tests)
2nd Quarter:
KMRA (5 different tests)
3rd Quarter:
WIDA
KMRA (2 different tests)
4th Quarter:
DRA2 Word Analysis
Sounds/Words Assessment
Naglieri
DRA2 Reading
Writing Sample (scored)
That list if for Kindergarten … (via Kindergarten Chaos and confirmed with our testing coordinator).
A total of 19 tests over a 190 days.
These are not the teaching and assessment as a normal function of the classroom. These are required standardized tests.
On average, in Kindergarten, one “performance review” every ten days.
BACK TO THE PRIVATE INDUSTRY EXAMPLE: Think about it. If you were reviewed once every 10 days, every day you arrived at work is one-in-ten chances to do well on that review. The focus would be on doing well on the review. We all know folks who do well on reviews and are rather worthless at work. They capture every win in hyperbolic writing for their file. They burry any negative information, sometimes allowing problems to fester rather than acknowledging and attacking them head-on. This is a recipe for corporate disaster, or at least for a sick corporation.
TRANSLATING TO EDUCATION: But you say, “Getting students to get good grades in a subject IS the job of teaching.” Think about what you are saying. It’s the equivalent of saying “Getting good performance reviews IS the job.”
Just as one can interview really well and have no interpersonal skills. Just as one can do great on performance reviews from the boss, but would fail miserably in a peer-performance review. Teachers can teach students to do well on tests, while not really teaching their students an understanding of the content.
We’ve all seen this type of thing:
- Students who can spell all the words in the dictionary, but really don’t know what they mean.
- Students who can recite the times tables up to 12 x 12 but can’t make change.
- Students who can pass a french vocabulary quiz, but couldn’t order a meal in Paris.
Teaching students to be cleaver at taking tests, is not the same as teaching them to be wise about what they are learning. Skill-and-drilling students to parrot back the answers to questions they will be asked on the test, teaches them nothing.
The current Federal system is pushing good teachers toward this mis-placed goal with mis-placed incentives. No good teacher or administrator wants to do this or will continue to do it over time. They will leave the profession. Leaving the profession in the hands of teachers who are willing.
As budgets tighten and more discretionary money is tied to testing, teaching students to learn to think starts to get in the way of “getting the money.” 
Sad, but true.
THE FIX: We need an incentive system which rewards teachers who cause their students to learn thinking skills, because we need the next generation to be able to think. Sure, standardized testing is not inherently a bad thing, but when a farmer spends more money and time weighing their livestock than on grain, they aren’t going to win at the county fair.
And I’m not talking about pay incentives for individual teachers based on how their students test. The book Driver by Daniel Pink dismisses such a notion.
And don’t say Kipp and Charter schools. They get to toss out any students who underperform, ensuring school-wide success.
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The sinker here is coming up with a valid indicator of thinking. How could we measure thinking in students – levels? categories? And what would each of those measurements mean? Would guiding questions and critical thinking questions then become learned/memorized material? Just because a student says a phrase, doesn’t meant they’ll understand it.
I’m with you. Just need to find a way for them to inherently “think” without just learning the steps and words.
If we leave room for it, people want to understand what they are doing. I think it all comes down to the management. Good principals hire good people and sack (even with all the safeguards in place) bad teachers. Bad principals hire bad people and sack (even with all the safeguards in place) good teachers. One can’t manage personnel from the Federal level, with standardized tests. One test a year with everything on it will point out the trouble.
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