Thursday, February 12, 2009
It shouldn’t take a Ph.D like David Berliner to tell us what’s wrong with the way we do accountability in schools. He sees parallels in baseball, too, and he’s no Joe Dimaggio.
Sporting analogy: When you put too much emphasis on home runs, he points out, people strike out more.
When you put too much emphasis on anything at the exclusion of other things, players adjust in ways that make them one- dimensional.
Berliner isn’t an expert on baseball. A regents’ professor at Arizona State University, he is an expert on education. With University of Texas-San Antonio professor Sharon Nichols he’s authored Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts American Education.
Berliner spoke at Baylor University last week, his theme being how high-stakes testing makes America less competitive.
“Any time you invest a lot of value in an outcome measure you get a corruption of the measure,” said Berliner, in a true academician’s phrasing.
Texas being a proving ground for high-stakes testing and the federal No Child Left Behind law, it’s notable that its schools have become poster children for “gaming the system to lie,” said Berliner.
This includes not just outright cheating, but any number of maneuvers to make sure low-achievers aren’t tested.
Beyond that is the problem of “narrowing the curriculum” to meet the task of passing a test on core subjects.
In Texas and across the country we’ve seen schools with low math scores become slaves to computation at the exclusion of everything else.
“If you are going to gauge a school based on a test, then you’re going to prepare kids for the test,” he said. Yeah, we need a Ph.D. to tell us this. Even Berliner sees the absurdity therein.
“What you get is really boring curriculum heavily favoring reading and math, and a drop in [emphasis of] almost everything else” — recess, math, music, arts, social studies, science.
Berliner said this problem is most pronounced in inner-city schools with more than their share of poverty cases, and with low-low test scores. For many students in those situations, education is drained of its Technicolor in favor of dry work sheets and test-based drills.
Once again, it shouldn’t take a Ph.D. to tell us this, but:
“Anyone who looks at the future of the American workforce knows it needs to be more adaptable than it is today. We’re developing a curriculum that’s very narrow, a one-size-fits all approach.
“Instead, we need a broad approach, one that’s wide so we have lots people who can adjust quickly when [economic] shifts happen.”
Success demands that schools emphasize such traits as creativity, collaboration and problem-solving, he said.
Cancer of boredom
Back to Berliner’s warning about a too-boring curriculum. Some traditionalists would consider that a weak complaint of the “touchy-feely” crowd that doesn’t want to crack the whip.
Well, Berliner cites a study in which 47 percent of those who dropped out cited boredom as the reason. It wasn’t that they couldn’t do the work. It was that they didn’t see any reason.
I know that the martial-law crowd can’t understand this, but: You know, schools ought to give children a reason to want to learn — other than passing a test.
It doesn’t take a graduate degree to see that we need to stop examining our measuring cups and examine what we’re putting in them. One idea would be to treat teachers as educators and not as vessels.
What you emphasize you’ll get, or at least lunging efforts at it. In the age of test-driven “accountability,” we are getting training and conditioning, but not education.
John Young’s column appears Thursday and Sunday. E-mail: jyoung@wacotrib.com.
Comments
By Texas Aide
Jun 17, 2009 8:48 AM | Link to this
The idea of "No child left behind" is great but the opposite is happening because many of the lower level kids already have a special ed label which can excuse their test scores from being included in the final outcome of TAKS. This can disqualify them for much needed tutoring (like dyslexia) because their reading scores are not being considered on the overall TAKS scores. We have wonderful teachers and staff but others could be left far behind unless they're lucky to have someone notice and take EXTRA time to reteach them how to read.
By Texas Aide
Jun 17, 2009 8:41 AM | Link to this
The idea of "No child left behind" is great but the opposite is happening because many of the lower level kids already have a special ed label which can excuse their test scores from being included in the final outcome of TAKS. This can disqualify them for much needed tutoring (like dyslexia) because their reading scores are not being considered on the overall TAKS scores. We have wonderful teachers and staff but others could be left far behind unless they're lucky to have someone notice and take EXTRA time to reteach them how to read.
By Kristen
May 18, 2009 9:05 PM | Link to this
I completely agree. I have been a chemistry teacher for 18 years. There are so many things wrong with this process, I can't name them all. It drives administrators to care about nothing but the test, because that's how they are being evaluated. It wastes huge amounts of instructional time in school for test prep and testing. It makes students think the test is the only important thing, so they don't really care about learning, especially after testing is over! It has really limited the creativity of teachers to bring in the beauty and wonder of their subjects because they MUST cover the test material. It stresses out the students and the teachers. TAKS is also a complete waste of taxpayer money. (And is the test-maker even in Texas? I haven't looked it up, but I wondered.) Why don't we use the money we spend on copying the test booklets and invest it directly in the schools? Using all that paper sure isn't very green!
Besides all this, teachers are being forced to all teach the same things without any regard to the needs of their local population. The idea that the government should tell us what to teach in schools has become widely accepted, but this is a socialist idea! Why can't we all decide what is best for our kids? Aren't we intelligent enough? What ever happened to local control? I guess that's another issue, but I wish someone would discuss that, too!
By Arce
Feb 12, 2009 1:30 PM | Link to this
There are similar instances everywhere. Prosecutors chasing convictions so hard they lose sight of justice and fairness, and end up breaking rules and laws that protect the civil rights of all defendants, innocent as well as guilty. Wall Streeters chasing big returns and incurring unreasonable risks resulting in the bankruptcy of their firm and their customers. Republicans so intent on cutting taxes that they cannot see that they are the cause of about $8 Trillion of the $9 Trillion national debt (Reagan, Bush I and Bush II). Football coaches chasing a playoff spot so hard they ignore the real needs of their players and put them at unnecessary risk of injury and death. Etc., etc.
By John
Feb 12, 2009 7:57 AM | Link to this
This quote from the editorial should be enough to tell the legislature and TEA that we are going far down the wrong path:
"When you put too much emphasis on home runs, he points out, people strike out more.
When you put too much emphasis on anything at the exclusion of other things, players adjust in ways that make them one- dimensional."
One of my personal gripes is that "the test", being multiple choice (choose the "best" or "most likely" answer out of four choices), doesn't help us teach students. Instead, they are taught to rely heavily on the strategy of finding the three answer choices that can't be correct. The choice that remains must be the correct one.
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