Everyone has an opinion about testing in the public schools. I really hadn’t thought much about it until I was teaching a Communications for Teachers course in the School of Education at the University of Colorado in Boulder in 1984.
I found two classes, if you will, of professors: One was made up of people who concentrated on teaching and one that concentrated on research, much of which had to do with the acquisition of data; number crunching. The teachers taught and the researchers got grants from everywhere to study education.
There were also a couple of researchers devoted to the number of Spanish-speaking immigrants and their children in public schools. The researchers, it seemed to me, had many more questions than answers.
The testing done in Colorado’s schools, PARCC, which is rarely defined, is the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. It is designed to show what is necessary in students’ education to make them ready for college and their career. That’s what this test, given to a 9-year old, is supposed to show.
The CMAS test, Colorado Measures of Academic Success, isn’t even a test; it’s “an assessment.” I think that means a test, although I have heard academics call it a “measurement device” as well. The home page of CMAS does not tell us what it is measuring or what it wants to measure, test or assess.
Michael Vaughn of the Education Post says that testing takes up only 1.6 percent of classroom time. He does not, however, tell us what the testing accomplishes.
What is it all about? Money, of course. At CU, there are dozens of people who don’t teach anything but who make a nice living studying schools. That is replicated at every university in the country. The obvious question is, if it has all this study, why are so many people unhappy with today’s public education?
I have no room to complain. I went to a private elementary school that had fewer than 80 students but had 10 teachers, including art and music. There were seven students in my eighth-grade class and the teacher was the principal. There were no grades and, other than quizzes, no tests. I coasted through most of public high school on what I already knew from my elementary school. Even in high school, classes were small. The teachers knew us and we knew them. I remember the names of most of my high school teachers.
We’ve often been told that everyone is unique. There has never been anyone exactly like you and there is no way, nor should there be, to duplicate you. Still, education administrators and scholars all too often see students as data points, numbers to prove that someone should finance their educations, their schools and, of course, the administrators.
Forty-eight years of teaching taught me that an experienced and dedicated teacher in a class of 20 students can tell not only the level of education, but the intelligence and probable education level achievable by a student. My teachers in elementary school knew me and my brother, knew my parents, knew (and liked) the principal.
In the 1950s, my public high school’s classes rarely exceeded 15 students.
This depth of knowledge about a student is no longer available in public schools, simply because schools must have 25 or 30 students in a class. There isn’t enough money to keep classes small enough to enable a teacher to know the past and estimate the future of so many. Most parents would like to have smaller class sizes for their children as they know that smaller classes produce better results, but they can’t afford to send their children to private schools where classes are smaller. It’s always about money.
I volunteer in a fourth-grade public classroom. Vaughn allows that fourth-graders have it the worst when it comes to testing since they must take both the PARCC and CMAS tests. I see the classroom with 28 students, all around 9 years old. Families have enough stress with one child that age. What about 30 of them, all day?
Does this experienced and dedicated fourth-grade teacher who was one of my best students at CU 25 years ago know enough about her students, know their capabilities and their prospects for further education without PARCC and CMAS? She doesn’t, because there are too many of them. Now she must rely on the tests. But the tests cannot tell her anything useful about what the child wants, much less what he may be capable of or what he may want to do with the rest of his life.
Are low scores reflective of a lack of knowledge or a lack of interest? The tests attempt to measure a student’s knowledge compared to the standards that establish what children need to learn, but they don’t dictate how a teacher should teach. The tests are designed for various grade levels but assume that every student at a grade level is just like every other.
The tests simply measure what a typical student should know at each level. But there never has been and never will be a typical student.
Parents want the best educations for their children but won’t or can’t pay for private educations in small classes. We may not like PARCC and/or CMAS, but the public school system is what people will pay for and without smaller classes, PARCC, CMAS and their ilk will remain in students’ futures.
Half of teachers who enter the profession quit in the first seven years. In those years, young teachers make thousands of decisions in hundreds of circumstances that affect their students’ futures. They must learn what works for them with individual students. They must learn to solve not only their own problems but also those of their students and parents.
They must devise a plan for every individual’s learning in their class because they know that every student is unique and not just a number qualifying for money from the state. For half of new teachers, it is overwhelming, and they leave, frustrated by their inability to cope.
Mass testing seeks to fill the void created by class sizes that overwhelm teachers but they can never replace having a teacher who knows you, cares about you as a person and wants you to be a critical thinking, well-educated citizen of the world.
David Steiner (davidesteiner@gmail.com) is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, a retired professor of theater and public speaking and a columnist for the Allenspark WIND. He was a member of the 2009 Colorado Voices panel. Colorado Voices is an annual competition among writers vying for the opportunity to publish columns of regional interest in The Denver Post.
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