A former teacher's story...

“You quit teaching because of the proficiency tests?!” 

The person asking the question almost always looks at me incredulously. Certainly tests are expected in schools, right? Sometimes I explain why I hate the proficiency tests so much, but I tend to get a little long-winded about this. For it’s what the tests represent, it’s what I personally rebelled against throughout my own elementary and secondary education, and it’s why I “wasn’t” going to be a teacher even though I was getting a BA in English Literature.  For me, there is a big difference between the institution of “school” and “education” and what learning really is.  

When I did decide to go into education for my Masters, I truly thought that I could weather the institution and make a difference.  However, things didn’t work out quite that way – mostly because I didn’t want to make waves for my district or my building.  Instead of taking the bull by the horns I quietly walked away.  It was too big, too ingrained in the system, and anything I had to say about it wouldn't change anything.

It's important for me to state that I never had what you would call a positive view of the "educational system"  for various reasons, including my own personal experiences.  I now have an even more cynical view, although throughout my Masters I kept thinking that things were changing, which kept me energized and vested in the program.  In the early 90's it was important to respect students as individuals, it was important to acknowledge there were different learning styles, it was important to have multiple ways in which to teach a lesson, it was important to know that there were developmental stages to learning -- not based on age, per se, but based on where the individual child was at that time emotionally, psychologically, cognitively, and developmentally.  While some things could be accelerated, the initial developmental beginnings had to be there in order for learning to take place.  I read people like Howard Gardner, Lucy Caulkins, Theodore Sizer, John Taylor Gatto, Nancie Atwell, and Frank Smith, all who validated my original beliefs about school/education/learning (and validated my feelings about my own negative experiences). They, and many others, gave me ideas on how to work around the problems so that students would learn.  Though I didn't know how long I would last in the system, I wanted to try.

Then the proficiency tests came.  I was still in my Masters program when Ohio first introduced "The Test." An educational psychology professor spent an entire class period statistically explaining to our Educational Psychology class why the proficiency tests were not a valid measurement of learning after getting sample questions from the test, and hearing someone from the State legislature in a call-in show expounding on how this was going to "change" education. However, politicians and other Powers-That-Be wouldn't listen to the many educators who spoke on call-in radio shows, TV news shows, op-ed pages, or went to the State House to voice their opinions.  To the Powers-That-Be Standardized Tests in Ohio were going to rectify all of our educational woes, and teachers who didn't agree with them just were afraid of being evaluated.

Nothing could be farther than the truth.

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The Last Straw

For me, the problem of all of this testing mania came to a climax the day I had to proctor a 4th grader taking the writing and/or reading test (forgive my hazy memory) in 1998 as he had not been in school the day they originally gave it.  I do remember he had been in several schools that year, ours being the 3rd or 4th, and it was only April.  I remember he was street wise, and very protective of his little brother. 

The part of the writing exercise was to read a poem about a birthday surprise, and then the students were to write about a time they had been surprised, or expected something to happen and it did.

The boy looked confused.  Though I wasn't "supposed" to, I looked quickly at the assignment, and asked him if there was a problem.  He looked straight at me.  "I've never had a surprise."  I remember that look and that statement as if it were yesterday. Being a proctored test, I couldn't tell him not to worry about it, to just make it up (which would have made it instead an exercise in fiction writing, not personal experience writing, and not what he was being evaluated on).  I couldn't "talk through" different experiences he might have had to find one that he could write about.  Even encouraging him to just "do his best" could have been taken the wrong way, though I'm sure that's the "teacher answer" I gave to him at the time. He found a way around it, I suppose, for I wasn't allowed to read his answer, but the image of his uncertainty and frustration haunted me.

I was so angry that day that I wrote a three page letter, which I never sent (because teachers weren't allowed to know what was on the tests), to the Test Company.  Sure, we know students often write well when they have personal prompts, but to assume that all students have had specific types of positive experiences (as much as we all want them to) was wrong, and then to evaluate them on their ability to write about them was wrong, too.  What did this tell him about his experiences?  That he was supposed to have had a surprise by the time he was 9 years old? And how did he feel, knowing that this didn't apply to him?  

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What is the Real Goal?

I was a Title I reading teacher in a repressed socio-economic area, with many different types of households.  While many students were lucky to even have one book in their house prior to going to school, there were also a majority of students who did have books.  Some of the students who I worked with just didn’t have strong literacy beginnings, or were just a little behind. While most had normal households, some had crazy households.   With the State threat of taking away money from schools because of "low performance," our district participated in the "off-grade" tests, too.  1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade students took similar tests to "prepare" them for the 4th grade and 6th grade tests.  Even 1st grade students took 4 or 5 days of tests: fill-in-the-blank, multiple-choice and short-answer. Each test lasted about 1-2 hours each day. This, for 6 and 7 year olds who are still gaining the developmental processing and thinking skills necessary to talk about things that they have learned about, let alone write about them.

I felt that I was perpetuating this madness by participating, not only in the test preparation, but also in "accepting" that this test was an educationally sound tool for evaluation.  And since I feel that learning is a multi-faceted experience, I didn’t, I couldn't, believe this.

I sat in team meetings discussing the need to evaluate students for a disorder most of them did not have so that they could be exempt from the test. Maybe that's not quite fair, the teachers were concerned about the students and how they were doing, but the bottom line was always how they would perform on THE TEST.  A label, even of ADD or ADHD (at the time) could buy more time to take the test or special "testing conditions" with a special designation and exemption so it wouldn't be figured into the overall class average (the rules have changed slightly on this).  And, yes, some of the students did have learning difficulties, and we quickly found the services to help them. Through these meetings, teachers referred students to me to evaluate. When I gave the report back to teachers about many of these students who participated in reading evaluations with me one-on-one, and who gave appropriate answers, and completed their evaluations at slightly lower, or most often, at grade level, reading capabilities, I would hear from the teacher "Oh, he does that for you, because it's one-on-one.  It's different." 

Yes.  It is different.  But if a child shows aptitude and ability within a small group setting, shouldn't we be happy that his/her brain is processing and assimilating information?  Shouldn't we be happy that the child is learning?  Isn't that what the goal is? And shouldn't we be asking ourselves not "Why won't he/she perform like that in the “regular classroom”?" but "What can we do to the “regular classroom” to help him/her, and others, perform better?" 

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What Education Isn't

Alas, this is not the reality of the majority of the classrooms today-- though I know that some are out there!  Just not enough.  After all, is the real world a “classroom,” with answers of a., b., c., d. all of the above, or e. none of the above – or is it a place where people need to communicate well with others, to be able to make informed decisions, and to be able to analyze and react to their surroundings?

In fact, with the push for tests, more and more classrooms are doing less teaching and interactive communication, and more drilling and learning facts that non-educators have deemed to be the “Most Important” for students to know. I find that the most puzzling thing in all of this.  The people who are making these decisions are often not educators at all, and haven't been in a classroom since they were going to school themselves.  In some states, elementary schools are being built without playgrounds, because of the belief that play is "trivial" and the time needs to be better spent on academics (See Susan Ohanian's What Happened to Recess and Why Are Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten for a scary wake-up call. It is because of this book that I found the Original StopOPTs website, and after contacting and speaking with Mary, volunteered to update it so I could become actively involved in fighting for more authentic assessments.) The Powers-That-Be have decided if children are going to pass these tests at all, they will have to do it without wasting time on a playground. 

All of these tests may possibly have their merits – some of the information is important and needed.  We wanted students to think about what they are reading, we wanted students to show their understanding of a math or science process, we wanted them to gain reasoning skills... but to put so much weight, indeed, incredible weight, on ONE test, without looking at other individual learning processes, achievements, abilities, or yearly progress is simply wrong in my mind.  So, I quit.  I "threw" away a Masters of Arts in Teaching, and became a technical writer. I wasn't tenured yet and felt I had to be extremely quiet, and frankly, even if I had been tenured, I doubt I would have said much.  It wouldn't have been "professional" of me to question the Powers-That-Be. Parents trusted me, and I wanted to help their children, but my pedagogy, my personal theory of education, got in the way of my job.  Ironic.

My stomach was always in knots because I felt, I feel, that this isn't what education is supposed to be.  I tried my best to keep my individual teaching style, to help my students love books (because that's where learning happens), but by each December, I was doing activities to "get them ready" for THE TEST (for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders, and by the last year I was there, for the entire school K-6), which was more about test taking than about reading for a purpose.** 

So, knowing that this wouldn't change no matter where I taught, whether it was reading or Secondary English, (I was certified in both) and since I couldn't leave Ohio, I left teaching in 1998.  And most probably, if it wasn't for the birth of my son in November of 1999, I would have just let the discourse about the insanity of the tests happen at parties and family gatherings when I felt like getting on a soap box. Now watching my son change and learn and develop each day, has forced me to look deeply again at what education is, and how learning is best achieved and evaluated.  And I am convinced that it isn't with a high-stakes standardized test.

Tracy Horstmann, 2004

**(Why do you read?  Do you ever read for pleasure wondering if you are going to be asked several inane questions to prove you read the book or article?  Would you want to read for pleasure knowing that every time you read something that you weren't going to be asked what your opinion of the story or article was, or what you liked or disliked about what the story or article? Would you want to read for pleasure knowing instead that you were going to be asked questions about what the Main Character was wearing on her feet when she walked to town?  Is that really why we read?)

			"The important thing is to never stop questioning" - Albert Einstein

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