“When Jefferson Parish school officials rolled out a laptop computer program in two middle schools three years ago and five other schools a year later, they had high hopes that it would help boost standardized test scores.”
I picked up a link to this article on twitter, put out there by my friend Jeff Utecht.
Stuff like this makes my blood boil.
I continue to have trouble understanding the obsession in the US with test scores. When millions of kids, teachers and parents are boiled down to a set of numbers, education has lost it’s way and its purpose. The people are left behind and the numbers replace them. Numbers are a poor substitute for people.
Now it is definitely possible that the laptop program in this place was doing little to help their students. Poor implementation schemes and teachers who don’t understand the reason behind a program such as this are both possible. Placing laptops in the hands of kids without helping all of the people involved in education to see and be change is a pit waiting for money to be thrown in to it. It will change very little.
But putting laptops in to the hands of people and asking standardized test scores to increase is an even worse idea. It comes down to what is being measured. Measure things that matter for our time. Measure connections and growth. Measure cultural understanding and a full host of changing, complex literacy skills. Measure interest and motivation. Look into what has been published by learners and shared with the world. Measure interactions and conversations and curiosity. These are the skills that improve lives and move nations, not the micro managed set of outcomes standardized tests are interested in.
Can laptop programs be poorly managed? You bet. But they can’t be more of a waste of money then the billions spent on standardized testing programs that measure few things that are important and instead suck the life out of learning and classroom life.
Well said, Clarence. My wife’s seventh grade students started a one-to-one netbook program this year, and thankfully I can’t imagine the program being assessed on its contribution to standardized test scores.
I’m curious though, especially as someone who left teaching recently after eight years in U.S. public schools; could you point me to some reading on the difference between Canadian and American curriculum/testing? Believe it or not, in all of my undergraduate and graduate work in curriculum, we did little comparative study of nations’ curriculum.
I’m curious as well. Many American teachers feel like we are being tested to death…so much assessing that there isn’t as much time to do the actual TEACHING. How are teachers in Canada held accountable?
TEACHING in Canada and the US are probably not that different. Assessment can be very different. Each Canadian province is in charge of it’s own assessment program. Some provinces (most notably Ontario and Alberta) have larger standardized assessment programs that other provinces. Still, the stakes are much lower than in the US. My province, Manitoba, has standardized assessments of varying types beginning in grade 3. As a grade 7 and 8 teacher I have several assessments to do. I have to assess expository writing, student engagement and specific math skills. But these are not “sit down right now and do them” type of assessments. They are simply graded as” meeting the outcomes, nearly meeting the outcomes, or being below level. These reports are sent into the provinces and sent to parents, but they DO NOT count towards a report card grade or percentage. At higher grades, in subjects such as math and english, there are provincially mandated final exams that do count towards a major portion of a student’s grade.
As for teachers, they are assessed in all sorts of way depending on their division and province. Most divisions have a rotating assessment policy of some type where teachers are visited in classrooms every X number of years and formally assessed against a rubric of some sort. My division requires me to make a professional growth plan each year and then meet with my administrator about that plan. I have never heard of a Canadian teacher being assessed against their assessment results (although I am sure they come up in discussion with administrators).
All of these things vary widely in Canada due to each province having ultimate control of their educational system. While provinces often get together to design curricula and sets of outcomes, they each have final control over their systems.
Great post, Clarence. Most resonating for me is the discussion surrounding the relevance of many tasks teachers are currently being asked to measure. The lessons and tasks surrounding reading and writing look different in my classroom because the end task (authentic communication) is different. This might include connecting with other students through their blogs, or creating good questions in preparation for a Skype call with people they’ve never met. As I assess the motivation of my students completing these tasks (high!), I’m constantly thinking of how to match these skills with my government’s curriculum document.
When I initially asked the opinions of others in my board, I didn’t get much input, mainly because they’ve never been asked. “What’s a blog comment look like?” As teachers, we need to share not only how we teach these important measurable skills, but also how we’ve aligned them with the assessment requirements of our own provincial reporting documents. Through conversations I’ve had with other teachers, I know they’d be more willing to try to incorporate some of these skills in their teaching if they could “justify” the task to criteria found in the government document. Are they nervous of admin.? Looking for an excuse not to? Maybe, but sharing our assessment strategies with these new skills may help move the process of teaching these skills to all students along faster. The alternative is waiting for the skills and vocabulary in the curriculum documents to catch up, and that isn’t happening anytime soon!
When I first started working in these ways, I thought a lot about assessment. When I think of my report card and the things that I need to report on, I began wondering what “revises and edits text” look like in a 2.0 world. I thought about outcomes such as “works in small groups.” Do those groups need to be local? What about thing like “categorizes and groups information?” I think most of the things we are called upon to evaluate kids on currently can be adapted to a changing world. Whether they are relevant or not, is another story.
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Hey Clarence and others.
I recently joined our high school parent committee and attended my first meeting and guess what it was about? Standardized testing. I tried very hard to voice my opinion on this testing (by the way we live in Ontario) I feel that the teachers feel that they are being tested as well as the results are compared to the division and the board. One grade 3 teacher here used to get so worked up about teaching to the test that she would pretty much stress her students out before they wrote the test! We do standardized testing in Grade 3, grade 6 and grade 10. Our high school principal said that teachers need to teach to the test and this drives me crazy!!! We get so caught up in how our marks compare to other schools in our division that we forget that we are here for the students and for teaching them. There is more to learning than how good you are at answering something. By the way, our results for global thinking and critical thinking are low. HMMM wonder if there is a direct correlation? I think so.
You’ve hit one of the major problems on the head: teaching to the test and the narrowing of curriculum. All sorts of schools have eliminated what they consider to be extras to concentrate on test prep. These extras may include such superfluous things as: music, gym, recess and even science education. At what point are schools no longer schools (if we define schools as public institutions that concentrate on learning and helping students to live better lives) and instead become testing centres? If we only want testing centres, contract them out – ti’s cheaper. But then count me out, I’ll go to work at an after school program or a tinkering centre for kids where interesting stuff is actually going on.