 |
|
|
|
|
Standardized test won't solve problem
By LEE KUCERA
Our new Governor wants to initiate a state-wide achievement test for high school seniors, and to make graduation contingent upon it. A friend who has been teaching high school in Silicon Valley for 25 years tells me that she is already responsible for administering no less than four lengthy standardized district, state, and national assessment tests to her students each year.
The assumption that high test scores are proof of educational excellence is patently absurd. Standardized test scores reflect the community, not the school. It's an invariable equation: wealthy communities have high scores. Poor communities have lower scores. To expect results on an exit test without dealing with the underlying problems that prevent students from doing well on it is shutting the barn door after the horse has escaped. If the test is implemented, is anyone going to pretend to be surprised when students in upper-class areas do well on it, and students from poor neighborhoods don't?
Renowned missionary-doctor Albert Schweitzer had one rule for newcomers to his clinic in Africa: "You're not allowed to make any suggestions until you have worked here for a year." I don't know how long it's been since Governor Davis and his education experts in Sacramento have spent any time in a classroom, other than for a photo-op on the evening news. I'd like to see them spend a month trying to teach a real-life classroom.
I mean one where students are enrolled and de-enrolled literally every day of the school year so curriculum is never presented to the same consistent group, there is no carryover from lesson to lesson, and assignment of homework is an exercise in futility. I'd like to see them become "accountable" for instruction in a classroom where 15 of the 20 students speak a first language other than English, and their parents are struggling for basic economic survival in a new culture.
I'd like to see them achieve "measurable objectives" with children who may be financially secure, but whose families are in such emotional turmoil that the kids are acting out at school the anger and confusion that they can't express at home. I'd like to see them teach a "minimum level of competence" to students who look at a long-division problem and see numbers scattered all over the page rather than lined up in neat vertical rows.
It seems self-evident that the education of children is not accomplished in the same way as manufacturing widgets. Yet it is that bottom-line presumption--that educational outcomes can be built into the process in the same way that quality control is built into the production of any other product--that underlies the quick-fix educational solutions so dear to incoming politicians' hearts.
The real solutions are difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. They involve eradicating funding inequities between schools in rich and poor neighborhoods, throwing the criterion of "higher test scores" out the window as the primary measure of educational excellence, paying teachers what they're worth, establishing top-notch trade and vocational schools, engaging parents in ways that are sensitive to the demographics of their communities, and somehow finding the means to deliver effective education in schools where children speak dozens of different languages and many are illiterate even in their first language. (How? I don't know how. Talk about a magic bullet.)
To deal with the real problems of California education is to acknowledge the appalling differences between economic classes in our communities. So we just invent another assessment test and make teachers and administrators responsible for its outcome.
I recently attended a meeting where a representative from a school-site council in San Jose said that in his district if measurable objectives are not achieved by the end of the year, administrators are all fired and replaced. Maybe it's me, but the break-their-kneecaps theory of motivation strikes me as a less than enlightened way of effecting social change--especially when we're dealing with an issue as complicated as educating millions of children from vastly different academic, cultural, and economic backgrounds.
The problems in California education are not simple, and they won't be solved by simple solutions--not by manipulating geographical boundaries, not by coercion or punishment, not by piling on increasing ways of making teachers "accountable"--as if they aren't already--and not by yet another standardized assessment test.
|
|
|
|
Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
