Testing,+Blaming,+and+the+Corporate+Model+of+Education+10-31-08

October 31, 2008 =Testing, Blaming, and the Corporate Model of Education = = =  I’m friends with this guy who’s married to my wife’s best friend. At one time this couple was living in a major metropolitan area, and they were concerned about that city’s public education system. We got into this conversation about teaching, and my friend, who worked in middle management for a major corporation, wondered aloud why public schools couldn’t be run like profit-driven corporations. I said, “Look, if your customers complain that your products are inadequate, and you can determine that the reason is that the raw materials you’re getting from your distributor are of low quality, full of flaws and damage, the simplest thing for you to do would be to switch distributors and get better materials from a different source. Teachers can’t do that. If we did, there isn’t a poor kid in the country who’d receive an education.” We didn’t talk much about education after that.

My wife used to work at a boarding school where a significant number of the teachers were twenty-two year olds fresh out of college and with no training in education. They were often smart, but rarely were they effective teachers. Nonetheless, the students at that school all went to exceptional private colleges and universities anyway. By contrast, in many districts the most talented veteran teachers are fortunate to make a difference with a handful of students. Honestly, many of the students at that boarding school were more prepared for college as incoming high school freshmen than some of our students are after four years of high school. And this isn’t just because these were wealthy, private school students. Such is the case with many public school students from affluent districts. It is an unfortunate truth that the single best predictor of academic achievement is household income, followed by parental education level, which of course highly correlate with each other. I could be the world’s best teacher, but if I have severely disadvantaged students, I will probably see more success in the classroom if I buy my students groceries than if I buy them books. Now, however, we spend less money on books and food than we do on state testing. And you know what those tests tell us time and again? The kids without food and books don’t do well on state tests.

In an October 18th article entitled "Let's all line up and just blame the schools",  former state representative William Collins writes, “this whole elaborate game of relentless testing and monkish record-keeping turns out to be just a skillful ploy to distract us from education’s real problem: poverty. Local educators are quite competent to create appropriate curriculums, lesson plans, special programs, and class excitement, thank you. What they lack are the resources to handle sickness, hunger, pain, transience, home distraction, abuse and the myriad baggage that kids lug into the classroom.” He couldn’t be more right.

At the beginning of my high school teaching career, I did two internships and my student-teaching in [|Windham], the latter at the [|alternative high school]. I had one student who lived with his mom in a small apartment above a pizza parlor, and if I needed to call home to talk to the boy’s mom, I had to call the pizza place. And if they weren’t too busy, and if the mom wasn’t working herself, they might send a waiter upstairs to go get the mom and let her take the call. I had this other student named Maria, whom I’ve written about [|elsewhere]. She was one of my best students, but one day she just stopped coming to school. One of the other teachers drove to Maria’s apartment in Windham Heights and found her alone with a toddler. Turns out that Maria’s aunt and her son were living there too, but the aunt had gotten sent back to prison for parole violation, and Maria’s mom told her she had stay home and watch the boy while she worked and the aunt cooled her heels in a cell. I ended up teaching with a little boy on my lap till my colleague was able to get the boy into a daycare for the children of students.

In my last year teaching at the significantly better-off community of [|RHAM High School], I had a wonderful student who suddenly began to tank in my class. I learned that her parents were going through a divorce related to a bank’s foreclosure on their home, and that her mother got caught embezzling funds from her employer to try to make their mortgage payments. We all know these stories, though most people outside of education are incredulous when we tell them. As a former colleague used to say, “the civilians would never understand.”

The current [|Connecticut state budget for FY 2009] allocates almost $15 million for just the Development of Mastery Exams Grades 4, 6, and 8. By contrast, the legislature allocated about $1.6 million for the School Breakfast Program and about $7 million for [|Head Start]. I suspect that there are a lot of fourth, sixth, and eighth graders who would do much better on their [|CMTs] if that $15 million had been spent on early childhood intervention programs—or even just on breakfast. Toast not Tests! Cereal not CMTs! How are those for campaign slogans?

I acknowledge that the state can and should assess students. But I’d have an easier time accepting this fact if there weren’t so much teacher blame going around. I love the fact that under the provisions of [|NCLB] a kid who doesn’t show adequately yearly progress qualifies for personal tutoring, but I resent the fact that the teachers at that kid’s school are forbidden by law from providing that tutoring. It’s a slap in the face to every professional in the field. Does anyone think that kid’s teachers don’t know what he needs? Does anyone think that those teachers wouldn’t be able to work wonders if they were able to work one-on-one with that kid? Chew on those questions.  To respond to this post, click the **Discussion** tab above.