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The current high stakes tests are like the textbooks. Feynman could not fix
How many here give NO tests, NO quizzes, NO exams to assess student
performance? How many courses did you take through your academic career
that had none? How many of us have never faced critical 'examinations' in
our lives. This is all part of life--at least part of the well ingrained
societal system of life.
Now I don't disagree that many of the tests are poor and that teaching to
THESE tests is bad. Rather I would call for tests that require the skills
and thinking that we really want students to attain. If the tests were
good--if they tested critical thinking and the like--then teachers would
teach to those tests--they'd have to. Fix the tests--that would go a long
way towards fixing the problems John and others have related.
In the end though--the real question, for all levels of education, IS
ASSESSMENT. How do you best assess student performance, student
advancement, student success? 'Trust the professional teachers' is what
one
often hears, is even what I would hope would be applied to me personally,
but the sad truth is that such trust has failed in the past. Everyone, at
every educational institution, knows there are teachers around them who
are
not very professional, who do not know their subjects, who are not doing
their jobs vis a vis the students. Sometimes the numbers of such teachers
is far too high. Someone is PAYING us to educate their children, and
especially in the public sector there have been spectacular failures in
this. NCLB exists BECAUSE of the poor job that was being done prior. It
may not have fixed the problems (at least not all) and many believe it has
caused new problems, but to believe that eliminating NCLB and high stakes
testing will suddenly fix our education problems is senseless. Throwing
more money at education without a solid plan of professional development
for
teachers, pedagogical reform, meaningful assessment, and most importantly
increased parental and student involvement AND responsibility in the
education process will most likely be of little help.
Students HAVE to get more involved in their own education--they need to
want
to learn (past the 3rd grade!). Those of us at the College level,
especially at private colleges, are fairly well insulated from the apathy
and even active resistance of students to being educated. We don't face
sub-cultures and seriously devalue education--making it a social stigma
rather than a badge of success. As the family structure disintegrates, so
does the prime support for schools, teachers, and students. How many of
us
'performed' at school to please our parents?
So--if we don't want testing, especially high stakes like graduation
tests,
SAT, GRE, ACT, etc., then we had better have an alternative that can
satisfy
the public as a whole and the legislators in particular, that we are
succeeding in our task to education the children. My take is to fix the
tests--the infrastructure, the culture, the expectations are already in
place for 'testing' as the primary means of assessment--lets use it more
wisely.