Teacher Stories
Submitted on December 8, 2011 by Timothy Boyle
Can you remember the last time your principal looked at data from an assessment you made? I don’t. Do you recall the last time you sat down during a half-day professional development and discussed data that didn’t come from an external testing company? Since I started as a teacher, I can’t think of anything other than PSSAs or predictive test results being the focus of data reviews at staff meetings. It disturbs me how our students are primarily measured by federal, state and local standards using measurements that we didn’t create.
These externally created assessments have created serious problems in our schools. District leadership and administrators bully teachers and students into engaging in teaching and learning activities just for the sake of doing well on these assessments. Students tune out curriculum that is based on outputs like test scores, rather than tuning in to inputs like passion and interest. In an effort to appease the ever-menacing accountability monster, some administrators and teachers put their licenses on the line and cheat. We get these products because assessment is no longer something we do, but rather something that is done to us.
I’ve only taught under the NCLB re-write of ESEA. There was a time before Adequate Yearly Progress that teachers in classrooms were trusted to assess their students. In those days, now long gone, teachers were invested in the assessments children took because they had created them. Administrators didn’t need to wait for some company to score and send back test results because the data was being collected right in the building. Students knew that they wouldn’t be defined by the results of just one test. Teachers, administrators, and students could feel a sense of ownership because assessment was locally produced and owned by a school community.
It’s not as if teachers are lacking the know-how to make their own assessments. Time and again I have seen interesting and meaningful assessment created by teachers at schools across the city, shared at professional development and networking events. The problem is we’ve lost control of assessment. The results of thoughtful, valid, teacher-made assessments do not show up on school report cards or parent information websites.
NCLB had supporters that truly thought the legislation would right a wrong. They realized that some school districts across the country were doing a terrible job of proving how different groups of kids could perform in school. Racism, classism, and incompetence were all reasons why school districts didn’t or wouldn’t accurately report the achievement results of their students. As a result all kids were not getting an equal education.
After a decade under the influence of NCLB, all kids are still not getting an equal education. Worse yet, the “accountability measures” doled out to schools labeled “failures” hasn’t created any better outcomes for kids.
Even the Secretary of Education acknowledges that NCLB is not working. I believe that replacing externally created assessments can go a long way toward fixing some of the most serious ills in our schools.
How then do we convince lawmakers and the public at large that externally produced assessments are not fixing the problems faced by some of our schools? How can we, classroom teachers, be trusted again to assess our students?