This year, Teacher Appreciation Week comes amid a daily drumbeat of criticism of the recent grades 3-8 English-language-arts and math state tests — and of standardized testing in general.
Adults in the anti-testing movement have seized on student complaints to bash the tests, the state Education Department, the Board of Regents and exam-maker Pearson.
The anti-testing spin machine knows how to feed headline-hungry reporters to fill the blogosphere, airwaves and newspapers with daily reports of errors in the tests.
But is the sky falling? The Education Department notes the error rate is actually tiny — those (gasp!) 20 translation errors on the foreign-language version of the math exam came among 3,863 test items, for an error rate of 0.005. The flaws in the regular math and English tests were even less consequential.
Plenty of government agencies would be lucky to get their error rates so low — with the city Board of Elections heading the list.
Again, with the mistakes pointed out, those questions won’t count. (The same process takes place every year, just with a lot less publicity.)
Of course, when you have a $32 million multiyear contract, as Pearson does, errors are embarrassing. But the hype surrounding the reported errors is inexcusable. (I say “reported” errors because at least some, in the now-infamous “pineapple” section, weren’t genuine mistakes. As I see it, state officials simply opted not to fight the politically motivated attack on those test items.)
This is all part of the broader assault on the No Child Left Behind law and on the Obama administration’s mandate tying teacher evaluations to achievement tests. It’s not student-driven, it’s union-driven.
Yes, “parent” groups oppose “high-stakes” testing, claiming that the tests are useless and only serve to stress out students. But these are mostly fronts for the United Federation of Teachers or other unions — which are really out to stop student-test data from being used to expose some teachers as unfit.
They can’t admit publicly that they oppose any serious measure of teacher competence, so they work to undermine each measure that comes along. They’ll blame poverty, race and now “error-plagued” tests to explain why students don’t perform well on state and federal assessments.
For themselves, many teachers and administrators truly worry that test results will unfairly make them look bad. Intentionally or not, some project those fears onto students, feeding student anxiety and parental angst.
Lacking confidence in their ability to educate has led them to sacrifice instruction time for test prep, to exhort students incessantly, to denigrate the tests and, in a few cases, to cheat.
But students and the public are told that “high-stakes” testing is at fault.
Young learners must be challenged. They don’t need selfish, condescending adults coddling them and assailing tests as useless. Nor do they need endless test prep; they need educators who will build their core skills.
Once mastered, basic math and language skills are transferable from subject to subject. Whether it’s social studies or earth science, students need to learn how to reason abstractly, make sense of problems, construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
All of which standardized tests measure.
If educators ease up on the pressure and teach key basic concepts in conjunction with critical-thinking skills, they’ll see success.
Teachers and administrators need to appreciate the special role they play in the lives of young learners. It’s the job of educators to reach all children and enable them to actualize their potential.