Prevent the misuse of high stakes tests in our schools
Background
I am a national and district award-winning educator of Law and Chicago History. Far more importantly, I am one of the millions of educators arising each morning to do our part to improve the lives of students. I teach in a high need school on the Southwest side of Chicago where due to social conditions, students enroll many grades below grade level and often with a mistrust or resentment toward the society we live in. Despite this, they commute each day through intensely violent streets trying their best to get their education.
It’s never easy, but teaching in these conditions has always been a joyful activity. And despite the obstacles, my students joyfully succeed. Students learn to live and love and thrive on this planet, and over time, how to struggle against and change the injustices they face every day. In recent years, that joyful educational success has come under attack. No teacher studies education because we yearn to administer an oppressive barrage of high stakes, impersonal tests. No student wakes up early and braves deadly streets so they can be routinely and constantly reduced to a test score. We come to that exceptional place known as a “school” with the same goal: share time so that we can learn from each other and students can meet their full potential.
Too many of us now find oursielves spending growing amounts of our time not on teaching, but on testing. Instead of giving students and teachers the resources we need to teach and learn, or sharing meaningful, accurate school performance data with the public, misguided public officials have attached high-stakes testing to nearly every new education policy. In my district in Chicago, my 9th grade students missed 25 days of instruction due to high stakes testing and test prep. The data is miscited, missampled and misused to push district mandates that do nothing to improve instruction. That in itself is severely damaging to students’ learning, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. The stories of individual students hurt by testing are heartbreaking:
• the student with special needs who just has gained his confidence in the classroom when he’s forced to take a 6 hour test, 8 grades above his achievement level and does not recover for months
• the student who becomes violently ill over the anxiety of the test
• the student who cries because they have been made to feel responsible for the fact that the teachers who take care of them might be fired or the school that is a refuge from a stressful home may be closed
• the student who says, “It’s not my fault—I’m just slow” and when I protest says, “No, it’s true, look at my scores!”
• the student who feels superior and then looks down on his classmates, community and racial background because they score better
• the student who shows up enthusiastically to school in August only to find that their favorite teacher has been removed due to a faulty test score
Some may expect that I am against the use of data in education. I believe deeply in the use of accurate data to enrich our lives. I remember my love of the national pastime enriched as I followed now-well respected data guru Nate Silver and the Sabermetric revolution in baseball. That’s why it was so heartening to hear Mr. Silver share his misgivings about the idea of using faulty statistical practices to turn student test scores into faulty teacher evaluations. He understands that making sound judgments depends on collecting good evidence, the exact opposite of what politicians are doing in education right now.
I agree with the commenter who asked Mr. Silver to use his credibility and access to powerful political figures to help teachers reclaim our profession and our classrooms from people who are misusing data, and hurting students and teachers as a result. “[If] you are willing to help call out inadequate approaches when they arise,” the commenter wrote, “you could help educators maintain a positive focus on helping students rather than defending themselves and the profession.” More than that, such intervention would deeply help students who are drowning in this deluge of high stakes testing.
Politicians must stop using faulty data to punish students, teachers and schools, and start supporting us in providing equitable educational opportunities to all students. We must identify better evidence of learning that we can share to help communities understand how students are learning and how teachers are teaching. Given how integral Mr. Silver’s statistical acumen has been to this past election, he could be a powerful voice alongside dedicated educators and students if he helped our communities convince officials like President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan to pursue an approach to education driven by student need rather than inaccurate, intensely profitable high-stakes assessments.
When I began teaching, I resolved that I would never stand complicit or silent with any policy or system that actively hurts children. As Americans who care about the welfare of ALL of our nation’s youth, we must fight to ensure that all students have equitable chance at an empowering education not extinguished through the abuse of overtesting.
