By Roger Phillips
Dear readers (parents, taxpayers, concerned citizens ...)
The purpose of this letter is to inform you that I no longer have time during my teaching day to educate children. Mandatory testing has replaced learning.
Currently, I teach middle-school accelerated English classes, but I have more than 30 years of experience at the secondary, community college and university levels in Michigan where I retired.
I’ve seen cure-all solutions and educational panaceas come and go—some good, most bad—but mandatory testing is related neither to student learning nor public-school accountability. As a result, I no longer teach, and your child no longer learns.
Oh yes, I still arrive at school before 6 a.m. each day—some one and a half hours earlier than required—and still use my weekends and holidays to correct assignments and essays to get caught up. And yes, I do attend mandatory department meetings twice a week, parent conferences before and after school and staff meetings.
Additionally, I do counselor and dean referrals as needed, post student grades daily on my computer, take and maintain daily computer and hard-copy attendance and tardy logs, adhere to special student health needs, attend mandatory IEP meetings when requested and schedule teacher detentions after school.
Lastly, I do textbook distributions and collections, follow Special Education and Section 504 implementation plans, promote infinite administrative programs and answer endless e-mails and phone calls from good people who wish to be informed—sometimes daily—on a child’s success and progress.
However, none of the tasks listed above has affected my teaching and children’s learning more than the continual, seemingly endless demands for mandatory student testing.
You see, the priorities of education have shifted so that it is no longer important to ask the question, “What do students know?” but rather, “What are student test scores?” Unfortunately, mandatory testing is not the cure; mandatory testing is the curse.
In education, knowledge has been replaced by numbers. Facts, data, information and details are now obsolete. Rote memorization is out; test scores are in. Numbers rule. It’s like knowing the score of an athletic contest, but not caring who played, who won or even what happened. Knowledge is out; numbers are in. In fact, as I write this letter I can hear the voices of my students—past and present—who demonstrate that very point:
“Who wrote Moby Dick?” I asked my class.
“Tom Sawyer,” replied a student.
“Are there 51 states?”
“Is Washington, D.C., in Virginia or Pennsylvania?”
“Wasn’t Dr. King one of our presidents?”
“How many days are in April?”
“Is UNLV a university?”
Back to mandatory testing …
The federal, bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 requires increases in the standards of accountability for public schools by requiring annual yearly progress be achieved by students. Schools and districts failing to make such improvements would be subject to admonishments, then potential losses of academic personnel and/or funding; hence, mandatory testing.
Testing has long been the acknowledged staple measurement for gauging student achievement. While it’s the only tool used under NCLB and the other mandatory tests, it isn’t the only means by which teachers determine student success. Work ethic, abilities, attendance, extra effort and several intangibles provide a more thorough analysis than mere testing. Teachers know that; politicians and bureaucrats don’t.
In addition to following federal mandates, as a CCSD English teacher I am required to teach a series of quarterly unconnected—if not disjointed—impracticable standards known as Benchmarks for which I’m held accountable and my students are tested.
The district Benchmarks are based on the state’s Power Standards, which are a disjointed listing of grammatical conventions, literary terminology and concepts that make no sense out of context. For example, seventh-grade students are required to learn pronouns and interjections—but the other six parts of speech aren’t mentioned. As a child I read books because my older brother read books. I read newspapers because my parents read newspapers. But times have changed. As a parent you are probably busy working two jobs; perhaps you’re a single parent as well and have little time to spend with your child or even read yourself. In America last year 44 percent of adults age 40 or younger did not read a book.
Once, a student told me that only old people read newspapers. Maybe she was right.
During a discussion on the events of 9/11, I told students that none of the 19 terrorists had been from Iraq.
“Seventeen, however, were from one country. Which country?” I asked.
“Florida,” answered one.
“Iraq,” answered another.
“Ohio,” guessed a third.
(Saudi Arabia is the correct answer; I read that in a newspaper.)
This school year my students will take no fewer than 12 mandatory tests, which will erode a minimum of 26 instructional days from their classroom learning. Some of these tests, in fact, will be duplications of the same test information. Due to time constraints and teachers not having access to the tests or answer keys, mandatory tests, therefore, often go ungraded as class work, and many students either lack motivation to take the tests or couldn’t care less about them. Some, in fact, refuse to take the tests seriously or at all, so what does that measure?
What is the schedule? Three CCSD Interim Tests (two days each, or six days), the Nevada State Writing Proficiency Test (two days), four quarterly building-level unit tests based on CCSD Benchmarks (two days each, or eight days), the Iowa Basic Test (two days), the Criterion Reference Test (CRT) examination—the big test which measures a school’s federal NCLB Average Yearly Progress (AYP) standards—(six days) and two semester finals (two days).
In addition to the test dates, I will need to forfeit at least another 22-30 days of class instruction for pre-test preparations, test analysis and post-test follow-ups in order to assure test concepts are understood and scores become the highest possible. With the time remaining, I’ll try to connect substantial information within my lesson plans so that the educational maze and merry-go-round of test information might make sense or otherwise be of some value.
Midway through an oral spelling-bee activity, one of my eighth-grade students asked, “Where did you get those words from?” She was referring to spelling-bee words like ambassador, rough, coupon, miniature, familiar …
“Two years ago when I taught English classes at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, we had a spelling bee. These are the words we used,” I answered.
“Those are Chinese words?”
Today, any teacher in a public school who tells you that they aren’t “teaching to the test” is probably lying. Printouts from test results make high-interest reading for the administration and the public alike. It’s not difficult to figure out the game or how it should be played, and it is a game in which students are the losers.
So how can schools improve learning and test scores without sacrificing education?
• Limit the mandatory district, state and federal tests that students take to minimum and reasonable levels. Perhaps four to six would work best.
• Allow teachers time to teach information that students need to learn. Eliminate state Power Standards and CCSD Benchmarks and permit the district’s curriculum guide to direct subject content. If students struggle with an aspect of subject matter, allow them time to master that discipline before moving on. (It seems each year teachers re-teach information that hasn’t been mastered in previous grades. Our students aren’t dumb; they just haven’t learned.)
• Permit teachers more opportunities to teach. Realize that if it doesn’t happen in the classroom, it probably isn’t going to happen. Administrators need to work for teachers and scrap those endless, trivial, mundane tasks that rob both teachers and students of valuable class time.
• Address and resolve non-academic issues. Students who choose not to learn don’t belong in classrooms with students who do. Behavioral problems are an administrative responsibility, not a teacher’s.
• Create schools that foster learning through more student activities that build school pride and spirit while bonding stronger student/teacher relationships. We live in the Entertainment Center of the World, yet in my five years of teaching here, I’ve attended one school assembly. (Want to increase the graduation rate? Find reasons for students to want to come to school. CCSD is second to last in the nation in student graduations at 63.5 percent.)
• Stop trying to mold all students into college-bound prospects. Nevada leads the nation in percentage of high-school graduates who do not go on to colleges or universities. In Michigan my former K-12 district size was 6,100 students, with high-school vocational training courses offered in home construction, cosmetology, small-engine repair, auto-body work and other occupational trades. Until this school year, CCSD with its 308,000 students had but one career school, VoTech, now renamed the SE Career and Technical Academy, a more politically correct euphemism. Last fall the NW Career and Technical Academy opened, and to date 2,100 students have applied for 510 freshman-class openings for next school year. See a picture here? (Four more career schools are scheduled to open in the next two years, and that’s great news.) There is nothing wrong with training students to be successful in non-college chosen careers.
We were playing classroom Jeopardy!, and in the category Famous Quotes the answer was, “The famous Scottish inventor who said, ‘Dr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.’”
“I know!” exclaimed one. “Who was Sherlock Holmes?”
Three years ago I Googled “smartest states in America” on my computer and found that Nevada ranked 49th of 50 states (New Mexico was 50th, while Vermont ranked No. 1) according to the Morgan Quinto Press (morganquintopress.com), a private research group located in Lawrence, Kansas. The results were based on 21 educationally rated criteria items pulled from American public-schools data. Today I researched the same information and found Nevada still at 49th and Arizona at 50th. (New Mexico moved up to 43rd.)
It’s not the students who put Nevada so low in the rankings, but rather the antiquated methods used to teach students. Why does the CCSD board of education need to send representatives to other countries (Spain, Mexico) to study how their nations teach? We have 48 states doing a better job than we are.
Teachers care less about test numbers and more about student learning. Over the years we’ve lost our abilities to impact curriculum decisions, maintain classroom order without repercussions and fairly grade students for their output without dumbing down courses or inflating grades, and we’ve lost the respect of students, parents and society, as well. Now with teaching to the test added as the next step in the spiraling-down of American public education, one needs to ask, “What could possibly be next?”
Last year this dialogue took place in my accelerated eighth-grade class:
“I need a couple of students to help Mrs. Brewer move some boxes.”
“Where’s she going?” asked one student.
“She’s resigned and is moving back to Oklahoma to teach.”
“Are you going with her?” teased another.
Jokingly I replied, “I wouldn’t move to Oklahoma if you gave me a buffalo.”
“Isn’t Oklahoma in California?”
“No, dummy,” answered a classmate. “That’s Oakland. Buffalo’s in New York.”
Again, I apologize for not being able to work more closely with your children. I know our concerns and interests are similar, but we seem to be held hostage by today’s political perceptions, misdirected pundits and mandatory test schedules. Everyone, it seems, has become an educational expert, except teachers.
Currently, the CCSD K-12 enrollment is more than 308,000 students. Given the days required for mandatory testing and its uncertainties of teaching the right stuff within persistent time constraints—while sacrificing student learning at the same time—one might only wonder why there aren’t 308,000 reasons to re-examine this issue.
That’s a number everyone should look at and no one should challenge.
Roger Phillips is an English teacher at Mannion Middle School in Henderson. To contact him, e-mail [email protected].