Standardized Testing: The End of Public Education
From a recent e-mail about "Gains in Houston Schools: How Real Are They?," an article in The New York Times today.
The educational problems in Houston have mostly to do with teaching and facilities. The area's teachers are terrible - I was very lucky at Lamar to go there when I did. Texas needs to vigorously test teachers and schools should split up teaching into specialties earlier on (it's a lot easier to know if a 4th grade teacher is good at teaching math if that's all she or he does). Also, many schools are physically in dreadful shape and it's no wonder students have no desire to attend. Finally, curriculums that teach toward low-level tests will inevitably lead to boredom and lack of critical thinking skills.
Note from the article that English-speaking minorities received low scores on national tests as well, so low scores are not just a Hispanic immigrant problem. Perhaps there is a cultural problem in some urban minority communities, insofar as parents are not or for some reason cannot be supportive of educational efforts for their children. Even if this is true, there is nothing the state can do about parental involvement - the state can only ensure that it is providing the best possible opportunity to all children, regardless of their background, class, or ethnicity.
I strongly believe that the major cities are not currently able to provide this opportunity and they will be further hobbled in the future by the so-called "Leave No Child Behind" Act, for the reasons cited above. Metropolitan New York and LA both suffer from many of the same problems that Houston does - chronic program and facility underfunding, low teacher pay and few incentives for teacher education, uncontrolled violence and an atmosphere of fear, and pathetic curriculums that by attempting to serve the lowest common denominator, serve no one. Standardized tests for students are not going to solve any of these problems.
As the article shows, superintendents trying to raise school scores will quarantine or even expel some students in order to eliminate low test scores. Furthermore, teachers that are hamstrung by a test-centric curriculum will not be able to teach their students skills or knowledge sets that are useful outside the local testing model. Also, if the tests are not properly calibrated in the elementary education system, then high schoolers will be ill-prepared, though their early test scores say otherwise. This will lead to frustration on the part of teachers and students alike and contribute to greater teacher and even student attrition. By the time the remedial students squeak through the system, believing that they are college ready, they will be adults with little time or flexibility to learn real skills anew.
I think education in this country is a horror show of epic proportions. Poor education leads to all kinds of problems but is particularly apparent in the state of political affairs. Lack of interest in voting, current events, and leadership accountability, not to mention susceptibility to already pervasive propaganda and biased media, is creating a crisis of democracy here. Given the education level of our voters (and other factors like gerrymandering), the crisis is likely to deepen over the next decade. And how can we go promoting democracy in the Middle East when we are barely clinging to it ourselves?
The educational problems in Houston have mostly to do with teaching and facilities. The area's teachers are terrible - I was very lucky at Lamar to go there when I did. Texas needs to vigorously test teachers and schools should split up teaching into specialties earlier on (it's a lot easier to know if a 4th grade teacher is good at teaching math if that's all she or he does). Also, many schools are physically in dreadful shape and it's no wonder students have no desire to attend. Finally, curriculums that teach toward low-level tests will inevitably lead to boredom and lack of critical thinking skills.
Note from the article that English-speaking minorities received low scores on national tests as well, so low scores are not just a Hispanic immigrant problem. Perhaps there is a cultural problem in some urban minority communities, insofar as parents are not or for some reason cannot be supportive of educational efforts for their children. Even if this is true, there is nothing the state can do about parental involvement - the state can only ensure that it is providing the best possible opportunity to all children, regardless of their background, class, or ethnicity.
I strongly believe that the major cities are not currently able to provide this opportunity and they will be further hobbled in the future by the so-called "Leave No Child Behind" Act, for the reasons cited above. Metropolitan New York and LA both suffer from many of the same problems that Houston does - chronic program and facility underfunding, low teacher pay and few incentives for teacher education, uncontrolled violence and an atmosphere of fear, and pathetic curriculums that by attempting to serve the lowest common denominator, serve no one. Standardized tests for students are not going to solve any of these problems.
As the article shows, superintendents trying to raise school scores will quarantine or even expel some students in order to eliminate low test scores. Furthermore, teachers that are hamstrung by a test-centric curriculum will not be able to teach their students skills or knowledge sets that are useful outside the local testing model. Also, if the tests are not properly calibrated in the elementary education system, then high schoolers will be ill-prepared, though their early test scores say otherwise. This will lead to frustration on the part of teachers and students alike and contribute to greater teacher and even student attrition. By the time the remedial students squeak through the system, believing that they are college ready, they will be adults with little time or flexibility to learn real skills anew.
I think education in this country is a horror show of epic proportions. Poor education leads to all kinds of problems but is particularly apparent in the state of political affairs. Lack of interest in voting, current events, and leadership accountability, not to mention susceptibility to already pervasive propaganda and biased media, is creating a crisis of democracy here. Given the education level of our voters (and other factors like gerrymandering), the crisis is likely to deepen over the next decade. And how can we go promoting democracy in the Middle East when we are barely clinging to it ourselves?
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