Standardized Tests: Start ‘em young!
Piggy-backing somewhat off of Dave’s earlier post here, my friend Brian Lewis-Beevers sent the following link to me:
Local Heroes: Seattle Teacher Suspended for Refusing to Give Standardized Test
Carl Chew, a 6th grade science teacher at Nathan Eckstein Middle School in the Seattle School District, last week defied federal, state, and district regulations that require teachers to administer the Washington Assessment of Student Learning to students.
“I have let my administration know that I will no longer give the WASL to my students. I have done this because of the personal moral and ethical conviction that the WASL is harmful to students, teachers, schools, and families,” wrote Chew in an email to national supporters.
School District response to Mr. Chew’s refusal was immediate. After administrative attempts to dissuade his act of civil disobedience had failed, at the start of school on the first day of WASL testing, April 15, Mr. Chew was escorted from the school by the building principal and a district supervisor. Mr. Chew was told to report to the district Science Materials Center where he was put to work preparing student science kits while district administration and attorneys consulted on an appropriate penalty for what was labeled, “gross insubordination.”
Read the rest here. Chew gives a helpful list of reasons why that particular standardized test is erroneous.
Yes, my motivation for posting this stems from personal experience. Mainly, I just don’t do well on standardized test. I don’t flunk them, but, I do have an inability to do better on them the second time around. It’s really disconcerting… they mess with my mind, to put it lightly. I took the SAT twice in high school, and did about 100 points worse the second time around; I recently had a similar experience with the GRE, doing significantly worse the second time around. But, I get pretty good grades in school, I think. In high school, I was taught to write essays, not fill in bubbles.
I am aware that not everybody can even be in a financial position to take these tests a first time, let alone a second time. My concern in posting this isn’t so much on college and graduate school entrance exams, but that around this country, most states start administering standardized tests like this when they are quite young, causing children around the nation to have warped views of their own ability to learn and perform in academic settings. Kudos to Mr. Chew!
Yeah, the WASL has not been very popular up here. Kris’ mom is a teacher and seems to have mixed feelings about it.
Louis Tully said this on May 6th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Interesting article Eric. Education is certainly a hot-button issue these days and deservedly so. Between the latest news of another school shooting, another torrid teacher-student affair, and another round of budget cuts there is little cause for encouragement. Personally, I have long been critical of the current education models and have found myself becoming an increasingly ardent proponent of homeschooling. As a Christian I am skeptical of the kind of education offered—-in theory and in practice—-by public schools. My critique, however, of this education is largely in response to the content of their education and not so much the form. I readily admit that standardized testing is a flawed and biased measure of educational success on the part of both teachers and students. But the problem runs much deeper.
While I applaud Mr. Chew for the show of character and am sympathetic with many of the critiques of standardized testing, I found his view and those of the article’s respondents to be rather incongruous. This incongruity, I think, is indicative of the very emotional and highly personal nature of the raging debate over education–a debate with the highest of stakes. But such considerations make it no less troubling. While Mr. Chew specifically took issue with WASL testing, the comments took on the broader issues of standardized testing in general and even the whole ethos of education today.
The vast majority of comments are in support of Mr. Chew as they offer critiques of standardized testing and public schools in general, critiques rather creative and leaving little to the imagination. They refer to such schools as “factory schools”—-part of a “corporate feudalism”—-churning out “zombies,” “robots,” a “compliant worker class,” and “obedient tools of the state.” These schools even get charged with being part of the (not so) New World Order. This is taken to mean schools have become “training systems” for “mind-control,” “brainwashing,” and “unquestioning obedience to the State.” One respondent even calls one proponent of standardized testing a “Nazi” and another claims the United States is on the verge of an “all out revolution.” Surely this revolution will come as a result of one man’s exclamation that “next year…it’s uniforms!” God forbid. The discussion reaches a high point when someone finally uses that word I was taught in 9th grade to level against a school that didn’t take into account what I wanted to learn: regurgitation. A few others devolve into ad hominem attacks and one guy takes a conspiratorial jab at the media for not taking a closer look at schools but regurgitating the “official” story behind 9/11, both to the detriment of the public. Clearly, Mr. Chew has been lost in the fray.
Looking at this statment, I am not convinced Mr. Chew is that concerned with standardized testing in general, but rather bad standardized testing. Moreover, his issue is properly with that which he knows best—-the WASL—-and the education system in Washington. I find it sad that his story is now being used as a rallying point for all those who cast themselves as noble Americans fighting the educational tyranny of the Federal Government. That is hardly his biggest battle.
Now it is quite evident to me that American schooling is placing greater emphasis on test scores and that such an emphasis is detrimental and ineffective. This is partly as a result of self-imposed pressure to keep with Germany, Japan, and other nations whose children typically outperform American students in such areas as math and science. The arts, humanities, and co-curricular programs have long been the first victims of education budget cuts and have thus served as martyrs for those taking up the cause of some truer form of education-—whatever that might be. I can understand why many worry over the decline in performance by American students when compared to those in other countries. I also understand why so many fear the kind of schools that would result were the humanities done away with altogether in favor of more “rigorous” disciplines. And so the solutions many offer center around better tests—-less culturally biased, more inclusive of other subject matter, graded more graciously, and administered in healthier ways. Others believe testing should be removed from schools altogether. And still others simply remove their children from the schools, rather than the waiting for the tests to be done away with.
I am troubled that Mr. Chew’s views are being conflated with those of this vigilant culture of parents and educators. I am sure Mr. Chew, as a public school teacher, is not in favor of every child being homeschooled. Ignorant people who claim teaching is “not that hard” when you order homeschool curricula “in a box” are surely the kinds of people Mr. Chew does not wanting teaching kids-—at least no more so than the same educators who are complacent in the face of the WASL testing system. Such parents are doomed to foolishly and unknowingly repeat the mistakes they are seeking to avoid, if only because they do not know how.
Though I am no conspiratorialist, I do believe the educational systems in states across the United States do play a part in the “brainwashing” of children. But like I said before, this has more to do with the content than the form, a point missed by one commenter who, seemingly in support of Mr. Chew, longs for a day when schools become less concerned with standardized testing and more concerned with “training students to be citizens of this great nation.” He goes on to add that students should also be given enough knowledge “to do well [and] prosper in the Information Age.” It is in this effort that private schools and homeschools find themselves on common ground with public schools. While they disagree over the form of education—-little disagree with the content. And when schools do argue over “content,” it is largely a matter of pragmatism, insofar as math, science, and the humanities are all considered disciplines within a more general category of “useful knowledge.” Education is seen from all perspectives as being the import of culturally-relevant and important knowledge for the sake of producing capable consumer-citizens. Under the veils of freedom, critical thinking, cultural sensitivity, etc. standardized testing is somehow associated with fascism while alternative education forms are lauded under the very same ideals as the highest marks of a truly free and progressive democratic populace. In a culture so enamored with capitalism it is little wonder knowledge itself has become a commodity, a means to an end. And so the very ideas of freedom, right-thinking, and tolerance go unchallenged because these are the very ideas that undergird the marketplace. Everything but the system itself is negotiable.
As a Christian advocate of homeschooling I cannot help but side with Mr. Chew, who is bravely willing to challenge the content of education—or in this case a test—itself. When the matter is too quickly reduced to a debate centering around testing and we fail to examine how our mathematics, science, literature, history, etc. themselves remain undoubtedly biased, atomistic, black-and-white, and enslaved to the ideals of Liberalism then the problems are repeated elsewhere—in homes, in private schools, in charter schools. While others remain committed to arguing over the merits of various strategies to make out children good citizens and successful members of the Information Age, I remain firmly committed to questioning that system in general. I am entirely authoritarian in that I want my children to be brainwashed. I do not want them to think for themselves or to make up their own minds. I want them to not only regurgitate information, but to embody it. I just don’t want that information to be determined by those who believe that the point of education is for children to learn to be successful—-however such success is reached. And so I hope to make allies with teachers like Mr. Chew who question what we are teaching children as much as how we are teaching them.
Then again, what do I know? I’ve always done well on standardized tests.
Kaz said this on May 7th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
Kaz,
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I actually had completely forgotten there was even a comments section on that site, so I didn’t lose any of the focus of the article I guess. So on all that and what have you with the “commenters”, I don’t have anything to reply to.
Regarding the form/content distinction: I think the distinction is a bad one. The form necessarily shapes the content and cannot be removed from it. Which is why, if you have constant abuse of the form of a test in such a standardized way that its form becomes abusive like this, the content is twisted and all but lost. Even the GRE has an analytic writing section which shows that you can’t cover everything (form and content-wise) regarding the articulation of one’s thought process when it comes to clicking on bubbles.
Put another way, in using your own example, the only way to regurgitate information is to embody it. Otherwise you have some sort of hypocritical fundamentalism; if people can’t perform, then the content is empty. And I am in no way equating performance with ‘results’ here, either. This is why I think essay writing is so much more interesting: because you have to perform the information. I’ve graded a lot of quizzes this semester where people could regurgitate facts (sorta) on that part of the quiz, but then the essays are crappy crap crap crap. This is why pastors, speakers, artists, etc. all have to actually practice their craft beyond the theoretical books on homiletics. And oddly and profoundly, it is why you will find very few books out there on ‘jazz theory’… mainly because it is one of the few arts out there that performatively refuses such systematization.
This is why narrative is so important: it reminds us that all of our facts are already valued, already ’storied’. This is why some history profs at PLNU are better received over others, because they tell history as a great narrative of sorts instead of a collection of facts. It’s always in the true repetition of the subject matter at hand that the information itself counts. This is the reasoning that lead Wittgenstein to talk about how the meaning of something is determined in it’s use, etc.
So yeah, I understand that there probably has to be some sort of ’standardized’ testing of sorts, but the fact that so dang much of it is awful (i.e. bad use) really calls into question whether it is really of any use at all. I’m not going to side with any of the commenters on that blog and their calls for whatever, though.
To me the issue over standardized tests ‘in general’ has nothing to do with how mediocre I perform on them or how well you perform on them; rather, my issue is that life itself looks nothing like a standardized test! Even mathematicians and scientists, who obviously have highly analytical minds (and must in order to deal with the analytical nature of the subject matter), do not perform in standardized ways in the lab or at the drawing board.
(Hauerwas’ example of being trained in brick-laying is also appropriate here.)
Peace,
Eric
Eric Lee said this on May 7th, 2008 at 10:30 pm