Beyond Accountability: Building Capacity for Schools, Teachers and Students

Dear Noah,

I like how you chose to approach the issue of testing without falling into the testing/anti-testing trap. I believe we need to assess our students continuously using multiple modes of assessment, including summative assessments that help to see how our students compare to those across the country and the world.

Although I have several issues with testing and accountability, I only want to address one concern today so I can focus on our students and the excellent work they have been producing.

Accountability has been a one-way street when it comes to our schools. The schools, principals, teachers and students are accountable to the state for improving their test scores. What is the state’s accountability to the schools and the students they serve? How can we expect our schools and teachers to improve unless the state helps to build their capacity in a meaningful and ongoing way? In a new report that all school leaders and policymakers can learn from, Linda Darling-Hammond shows that nations that outperform the U.S. on international assessments provide “teachers with opportunities for extended learning and productive collaboration with colleagues” and “invest heavily in PD and build time for ongoing, sustained teacher development and collaboration into teachers’ work day.” Sadly, I feel that the push to raise test scores too often results in professional development and teaching that focus on the drilling of decontextualized skills in isolation rather than the kind of critical thinking and relationship thinking we aim to teach in our classroom.

To close, I just want to share an exciting example from our classroom. About a week after we started our “Three World’s Meet” unit in social studies, we were doing a read aloud about what life would have been like on Columbus’s ships. After the read aloud a student came up to me and made a brilliant connection. She said, “I notice a connection between the whips on Columbus’s boats and slavery. Europe took over North America and Africa. So they took blacks and put them in the South and started slavery. They could get the idea of using whips on slaves from whipping Europeans on Columbus’s boat.”

I hope one day soon we can help our society value these everyday classroom connections and interactions the same way we value high stakes test scores.

Best,

Mike

Data can be deceiving…

Dear Mike,

The problem with generalizations in the field of education is that children are often extremely unpredictable.  George Soros has made a fortune by making a similar case about the market, claiming that irrational human tendencies can trump even the most numerically sound business plans and conjectures.  The problem relying upon data, trends and tendencies, whether in education or business, is that the numbers often fail to account for the mundane realities that play such a huge role in student or corporate performance.

Today, our school administered an Interim ELA Assessment.  This assessment is teacher-created and has been modeled off of the high stakes New York State ELA Test that students take each year.  One student in our class decided not to write a single word of the essay question that was asked on the test.  This evening I had a long conversation with her mother who was as baffled as you and I were with her daughter’s performance today, or lack thereof.

Now, I know this situation was an exception, not a rule.  However, the capability of a child to be in such a mood on such a test puts into question the validity of using state test scores as a basis for school evaluation and teacher merit pay.  This student comes from a very strong home and has no external reason to refuse to perform on such an exam.  Was it our fault that she didn’t write anything?  Was it the school’s fault?  Was it her parents , her friends, or her after school teachers who were at fault?  Regardless, had this performance occurred on a state administered test, a zero would have been recorded for a student who was more than capable of passing these tests.

Further, as I read the rest of the essays that our students wrote, it is becoming more and more clear that having eight, nine and ten year-old students taking standardized tests is a similar exercise to squeezing square pegs into round holes.  The same student who just last Thursday spent over an hour helping a struggling student write a slave narrative in social studies decided that it would be in her best interest to put her head down for 20 minutes and refuse to perform on a formal assessment today.

I am not theoretically against the idea of testing.  It is important that we have tools and metrics in education to measure students achievement.  We need tools that help us to measure students from across the state and across the country using common standards and evaluative methodologies.  However, the high stakes climate in education right now is creating much undue stress on both educators and students and is not always leading to the highest levels of student performance.

Data is only valuable in education if it’s valid.

Best,

Noah