You are a college professor.
I have just retired as a high school teacher.
I have some bad news for you. In case you do not already see what is happening, I want to warn you of what to expect from the students who will be arriving in your classroom, even if you teach in a highly selective institution.
No Child Left Behind went into effect for the 2002–03 academic year, which means that America’s public schools have been operating under the pressures and constrictions imposed by that law for a decade. Since the testing requirements were imposed beginning in third grade, the students arriving in your institution have been subject to the full extent of the law’s requirements. While it is true that the U.S. Department of Education is now issuing waivers on some of the provisions of the law to certain states, those states must agree to other provisions that will have as deleterious an effect on real student learning as did No Child Left Behind—we have already seen that in public schools, most notably in high schools.
Troubling Assessments
My primary course as a teacher was government, and for the last seven years that included three or four (out of six) sections of Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. Government and Politics. My students, mostly tenth graders, were quite bright, but already I was seeing the impact of federal education policy on their learning and skills.
In many cases, students would arrive in our high school without having had meaningful social studies instruction, because even in states that tested social studies or science, the tests did not count for “adequate yearly progress” under No Child Left Behind. With test scores serving as the primary if not the sole measure of student performance and, increasingly, teacher evaluation, anything not being tested was given short shrift.
Further, most of the tests being used consist primarily or solely of multiple-choice items, which are cheaper to develop, administer, and score than are tests that include constructed responses such as essays. Even when a state has tests that include writing, the level of writing required for such tests often does not demand that higher-level thinking be demonstrated, nor does it require proper grammar, usage, syntax, and structure. Thus, students arriving in our high school lacked experience and knowledge about how to do the kinds of writing that are expected at higher levels of education.
Recognizing this, those of us in public schools do what we can to work on those higher-order skills, but we are limited. Remember, high schools also have tests—No Child Left Behind and its progeny (such as Race to the Top) require testing at least once in high school in reading and math. In Maryland, where I taught, those tests were the state’s High School Assessments in tenth-grade English and algebra (which some of our more gifted pupils had taken as early as eighth grade). High schools are also forced to focus on preparing students for tests, and that leads to a narrowing of what we can accomplish in our classrooms.
I mentioned that at least half my students were in AP classes. The explosive growth of these classes, driven in part by high school rankings like the yearly Challenge Index created by Jay Mathews of The Washington Post, is also responsible for some of the problems you will encounter with students entering your institutions. The College Board did recognize that not everything being labeled as AP met the standards of a college-level course, so it required teachers to submit syllabi for approval to ensure a minimal degree of rigor, at least on paper. But many of the courses still focus on the AP exam, and that focus can be as detrimental to learning as the kinds of tests imposed under No Child Left Behind.
Let me use as an example my own AP course, U.S. Government and Politics. I served several times as a reader for the examination that follows the course. In that capacity, I read the constructed responses that make up half of the score of a student’s examination. I saw several problems.
First (and I acknowledge that I bear some culpability here), in the AP U.S. Government exam the constructed responses are called “free response questions” and are graded by a rubric that is concerned primarily with content and, to a lesser degree, argument. If a student hits the points on the rubric, he or she gets the points for that rubric. There is no consideration of grammar or rhetoric, nor is credit given or a score reduced based on the format of the answer. A student who takes time to construct a clear topic sentence and a proper conclusion gets no credit for those words. Thus, a teacher might prepare the student to answer those questions in a format that is not good writing by any standard. If, as a teacher, you want your students to do their best, you have to have them practice what is effectively bad writing— no introduction, no conclusion, just hit the points of the rubric and provide the necessary factual support. Some critical thinkingmay be involved, at least, but the approach works against development of the kinds of writing that would be expected in a true college-level course in government and politics.
My students did well on those questions because we practiced bad writing. My teaching was not evaluated on the basis of how well my students did, but I felt I had a responsibility to prepare them for the examination in a way that could result in their obtaining college credit.
I would like to believe that I prepared them to think more critically and to present cogent arguments, but I could not simultaneously prepare them to do well on that portion of the test and teach them to write in a fashion that would properly serve them at higher levels of education.
Even during those times when I could assign work that required proper writing, I was limited in how much work I could do on their writing. I had too many students. In my final year, with four sections of Advanced Placement, I had 129 AP students (as well as an additional forty-six students in my other two classes). A teacher cannot possibly give that many students the individualized attention they need to improve their writing. Do the math. Imagine that I assign all my students a written exercise. Let’s assume that 160 actually turn it in. Let’s further assume that I am a fast reader, and I can read and correct papers at a rate of one every three minutes. That’s eight hours—for one assignment. If it takes a more realistic five minutes per paper, the total is more than thirteen hours.
Further, the AP course required that a huge amount of content be covered, meaning that too much effort is spent on learning information and perhaps insufficient time on wrestling with the material at a deeper level. I learned to balance these seemingly contradictory requirements. For much of the content I would give students summary information, sufficient to answer multiple-choice questions and to get some of the points on rubrics for the free response questions. That allowed me more time for class discussions and for relating events in the news to what we learned in class, making the class more engaging for the students and resulting in deeper learning because the discussions were relevant to their lives.
From what I saw from the free response questions I read, too many students in AP courses were not getting depth in their learning and lacked both the content knowledge and the ability to use what content knowledge they had.
The structure of testing has led to students arriving at our school without what previously would have been considered requisite background knowledge in social studies, but the problem is not limited to this field. Students often do not get exposure to art or music or other nontested subjects. In high-need schools, resources not directly related to testing are eliminated: at the time of the teachers’ strike last fall, 160 Chicago public schools had no libraries. Class sizes exceeded forty students—in elementary school.
A Teacher’s Plea
As a retired public school teacher, I believe I have a responsibility to offer a caution to college professors, or perhaps to make a plea.
Please do not blame those of us in public schools for how unprepared for higher education the students arriving at your institutions are. We have very little say in what is happening to public education. Even the most distinguished and honored among us have trouble getting our voices heard in the discussion about educational policy. The National Teacher of the Year is supposed to be the representative of America’s teachers—if he or she cannot get teachers’ voices included, imagine how difficult it is for the rest of us. That is why, if you have not seen it, I strongly urge you to read 2009 National Teacher of the Year Anthony Mullen’s famous blog post, “Teachers Should Be Seen and Not Heard.” After listening to noneducators bloviate about schools and teaching without once asking for his opinion, he was finally asked what he thought. He offered the following:
Where do I begin? I spent the last thirty minutes listening to a group of arrogant and condescending noneducators disrespect my colleagues and profession. I listened to a group of disingenuous people whose own self-interests guide their policies rather than the interests of children. I listened to a cabal of people who sit on national education committees that will have a profound impact on classroom teaching practices. And I heard nothing of value. “I’m thinking about the current health-care debate,” I said. “And I am wondering if I will be asked to sit on a national committee charged with the task of creating a core curriculum of medical procedures to be used in hospital emergency rooms.”
The strange little man cocks his head and, suddenly, the fly on the wall has everyone’s attention.
“I realize that most people would think I am unqualified to sit on such a committee because I am not a doctor, I have never worked in an emergency room, and I have never treated a single patient. So what? Today I have listened to people who are not teachers, have never worked in a classroom, and have never taught a single student tell me how to teach.”
During my years in the classroom I tried to educate other adults about the realities of schools and students and teaching. I tried to help them understand the deleterious impact of policies that were being imposed on our public schools. I blogged, I wrote letters and op-eds for newspapers, and I spent a great deal of time speaking with and lobbying those in a position to influence policy, up to and including sitting members of the US House of Representatives and Senate and relevant members of their staffs. Ultimately, it was to little avail, because the drivers of the policies that are changing our schools—and thus increasingly presenting you with students ever less prepared for postsecondary academic work—are the wealthy corporations that profit from the policies they help define and the think tanks and activist organizations that have learned how to manipulate the levers of power, often to their own financial or ideological advantage.
If you, as a higher education professional, are concerned about the quality of students arriving at your institution, you have a responsibility to step up and speak out. You need to inform those creating the policies about the damage they are doing to our young people, and how they are undermining those institutions in which you labor to make a difference in the minds and the lives of the young people you teach as well as in the fields in which you do your research.
You should have a further selfish motivation. Those who have imposed the mindless and destructive patterns of misuse of tests to drive policy in K–12 education are already moving to impose it on higher education, at least in the case of the departments and schools of education that prepare teachers: they want to “rate” those departments by the test scores of the students taught by their graduates.
If you, as someone who teaches in the liberal arts or engineering or business, think that this development does not concern you, think again. It is not just that schools and colleges of education are major sources of revenue for colleges and universities—they are in fact often cash cows, which is why so many institutions lobby to be able initially to certify teachers and then to offer the courses (and degrees) required for continuing certification. If strictures like these can be imposed on schools and colleges of education, the time will be short before similar kinds of measure are imposed on other schools, including liberal arts, engineering, business, and conceivably even professional schools like medicine and law. If you teach either in a medical school or in programs that offer courses required as part of the pre-med curriculum, do you want the fatality rates of patients treated by the doctors whom you have taught to be used to judge your performance? If you think that won’t happen because you work at a private institution, remember that it is the rare private university that does not receive some form of funding from governments, local to national. Research grants are one example; the scholarships and loans used by students to attend your institution are another.
Let me end by offering my deepest apologies, not because I may have offended some of you by what I have written, but because even those of us who understood the problems that were being created were unable to do more to stop the damage to the education of our young people. Many of us tried. We entered teaching because we wanted to make a difference in the lives of the students who passed through our classrooms. Many of us are leaving sooner than we had planned because the policies already in effect and those now being implemented mean that we are increasingly restricted in how and what we teach.
Now you are seeing the results in the students arriving at your institutions. They may be very bright. But we have not been able to prepare them for the kind of intellectual work that you have every right to expect of them. It is for this that I apologize, even as I know in my heart that there was little more I could have done. Which is one reason I am no longer in the classroom.
*****
Winner Comments:
#One
When President Bush and Senator Kennedy gave us “No Child Left Behind”, there was really nothing new. The educational industrial complex has been run by non teachers for at least the past fifty years. Every few years we are treated to the new fad which will solve all our problems. The reality is that no fad will work. Education requires dedication on the part of parents much more so than teachers. A teacher who has your children 180 days a year for six hours a day cannot replace a parent nor can he or she on a regular basis instill the discipline necessary to complete a rigorous twelve year program.
Today, we have the uninvolved parent in the inner city, usually from a single parent household who has neither the time, inclination or basic knowledge necessary to see their children succeed in school. On the other end of the spectrum we have the over achieving nut case parent who wants their child to have twelve meaningless AP classes guaranteeing that nothing lasting is taught and that they are watered down to mean nothing period. Sadly in the middle are the poor kids who should be eating up education, growing and thirsting for knowledge. They are ignored. They are taught by rote, if at all, caught in the middle of educational “experiments” lacking in a basic understanding of science, civil society, ethical responsibility., English and most importantly History which is rarely taught anymore but encompasses all the disciplines listed above. As my high school History teacher repeated over and over again, if you don’t know where you have been you cannot possibly know where you are going.
If present trends continue and I have no doubt they will (too many competing agendas and too much money to be made) this thing will just collapse of itself and that, is not limited to the educational establishment.
# Two
As a Ph.D. student, I’ve been a college instructor (liberal arts) for 7 years. The tests you describe work for math, where there is only one set of possible correct answers. This is not the case in most of the liberal arts, where a student’s ability to identify nuance and variability is part of what we are trying to measure. What I hear you saying is, “Why don’t you just make a better test? Fix it rather than griping!” But while this may sound like a cop-out, it can’t be done. You can’t create a *simple* test – by which I mean, one that is easy to grade – that is an accurate, nuanced assessment of complex skills such as writing, critical thinking, or synthesis of evidence. Meanwhile, any complex assessment you create will require far more time and effort – and subjective judgment, which defeats the whole point of standardized testing – from graders. This is something teachers struggle with daily: how to balance the rigor of your assessments and the amount of feedback to give your students against the sheer amount of time it will take to provide it.
This article *is* about the source of instructional breakdowns: the system of standardized testing itself. It’s an inevitable result of the mismatch between the practical need for a simple, standardized, easy-to-grade test, and the complexity of the skills we are trying to measure and cultivate in students.To pass any sort of standardized test requires nothing more from students than the output you could expect from a machine. We’re treating students like factory products, to be standardized and minimally quality-checked. We’re treating teachers like manufacturing equipment, to be replaced if they interfere with the uniform working of the system. We’re trying to create input-output machines rather than human beings. And in an age where computers can perform more and more of the tasks that once required people, the last thing we need is to be turning out people who are no different from computers.
#Three
As a teacher of writing at the college level for over 35 years, I couldn’t agree more with lirantha.
The input-output model, the machine model, the manufacturing model — all these contradict the nature of life itself, in a purely biological sense, and they completely sell short human cognition. Intelligence is so much more than “hit the essential points on the rubric.” The role of imagination, creativity, critical and analytical thinking is everywhere. If the carpenter repairing your porch or the plumber fixing your heating system doesn’t have these qualities, he or she is probably going to leave some problem unsolved or some rot waiting to happen.
That which can be tested, efficiently, in a way that produces the appearance of statistical significance, inexorably becomes what is taught — in a fully testing-driven environment where there is an impossible student-teacher ratio. This describes our public schools.
I find it infuriating when people in power claim that class size doesn’t matter. Apparently only people who have actually taught are able to understand that there is NO WAY one teacher can adequately teach writing to 160 students. It is not possible. Working with writing is individual, one-to-one, labor-intensive teaching. If there is no willingness to recognize this as a fact, then we can’t expect any better results. As a person who prepares future teachers of writing (I teach a writing pedagogy class), I regularly feel the contradiction between what I know good teaching requires and what is actually possible in the schools. The feeling of powerlessness is more and more pervasive and draining.
#Four
Basing cut scores (“college readiness”) on SAT scores is like building a skyscraper on sand–the structure is going to collapse, no matter how you try to shore it up. Those who determine the cut scores know this–that they aren’t valid–so why would they promulgate this “crisis” in education? Because that’s exactly what they’re doing–creating an artificial crisis. Who benefits? The testing companies that make huge profits from public monies. Predatory reformers, such as ALEC, who want to privatize ALL public education, so they can make huge profits. Who loses? Children in public schools–those who are now labeled as failures.
It’s interesting to read this article and the one by Kenneth Bernstein (“A warning to college profs by a high school teacher”).
In the past decade teachers have learned a lot about teaching (mostly from brain studies, etc.); students have continued to learn about various subjects, increasing their knowledge year after year. But policy-makers apparently have learned nothing. The definition of insanity? Doing the same thing (standardized testing) over and over and expecting different results. The results of 12 years of NCLB have been disastrous, as noted not just by Bernstein but also by the nearly 3000 comments in response to his article. Yet New York and other states, rather than walking away from all this standardized testing, are making it even more draconian. Our future does not look bright.
#Five
State Opt Out/Refusal Guides found HERE.
http://unitedoptout.com/opt-outrefusal-guides-for-…
Back to school protest pack
http://unitedoptout.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/UOO-Toolkit-Revised-8.4.13.pdf
#Six
Until the unions and professional associations organize the millions of teachers in this country, no change will occur. Teaching is the most regulated profession there is by the federal government, and I for one am so tired of teachers saying there is nothing we can do. We must organize and act together for our own interests, and do not rely on the young teachers who do not plan on making this a life long profession. Alternative certification programs provide the cheap labor school systems are looking for….As a Social Studies teacher, I don’t understand how you/we can tell kids that ours is a nation of the people, for the people, when the people don’t do anything, including the teachers, to take back some power.