This summer at the SOS March & National Call to Action, I was pleased to see some young and enthusiastic, but independent-minded and healthily skeptical teachers. Among them was DCPS elementary school teacher, Olivia Chapman (on twitter: @sedcteacher). Olivia dual-majored in special and general education at The College of Saint Rose in her native upstate New York and then worked for a year as a substitute teacher in Albany, New York, before accepting her current position. I was so impressed with Olivia (plus I'm always looking to feature the voices of teachers and education professionals who are on the ground) that I solicited a guest post from her. If she is symbolic of the young, smart, dedicated, and energetic teachers that neo-liberal reformers so often talk of attracting and keeping in the teaching profession, from Olivia's account below, they're not doing a very good job. Who, especially with all those qualities, lasts long in a stifling and absurd environment such as Olivia describes? For our nation's sake, I pray that Olivia and so many of the discouraged newer teachers I've talked to in recent years stick it out. We need you! As one of my children's teachers told me as we talked about the limitations of standardization and high-stakes testing were doing, "The pendulum is always swinging; I'm just waiting for it to swing in the other direction." In too many schools and systems, teaching rich, meaningful, and varied content and leading our children to embrace the beauty of the life of the mind has become an act of defiance when it should be an ethos. Here is Olivia's piece:
A Lesson on Failing
We hear a great deal these days from the media and educationreformers about our “broken” public school system and about “failing” publicschools. While I certainly haven’t been to all public schools and seen them formyself, I see and read about success in public schools often enough to knowthat not all public schools are“failing.” Unfortunately, though, Ihappen to work at a school that is failing and I used to be part of the reasonfor that failure.
Just to be clear, I'm not referring to a label of “failure”often placed on schools due to their failure to meet No Child Left Behind's lofty and unattainable AYP (Adequate YearlyProgress) requirements. My school is failing because of what NCLB’s mandateshave done to the students, teachers, and to the community. My school is failingbecause morality, honesty, compassion, and values have been replaced by anobsession with data, accountability, standardized testing, and evaluations.
Authentic, creative, and innovational learning experienceshave been replaced by practice tests, overwhelming amounts of interimassessments, multiple choice drill and practice sheets, and an inundation ofmandated programs and paper work that have little impact on real studentlearning. I have seen genuinely good,veteran teachers lose touch with their morals out of fear. I have seen childrenbow their heads in shame upon the revelation that their test scores labeledthem below basic in reading or math. I have had parents refer solely to theirchildren’s test scores to describe their abilities, telling me that theirchildren are good at math, but bad at reading and vice versa. I have witnessedcheating and lying to save careers. I have witnessed the stealing of materialsand resources because budget cuts have allowed for very little funding for whatour students really need. This is the harsh reality and this is failing. We arefailing ourselves and we are failing our students. We are neglecting to trulyeducate our students because teachers aren’t allowed to be innovative andcreative. Instead, we are overwhelmed by the task of producing robotictest-takers rather than thoughtful, lifelong learners.
When I was hired at DC Public Schools I was told that if Icouldn’t get the students' test scores up, I was dispensable. Teachers who havestudents with high test scores are put on pedestals and those without arestigmatized, humiliated, and downright disrespected by the administration. Thiswas the culture that I was thrown into as a first year teacher. At first, I wasdetermined to succeed at attaining this highly esteemed respect from mycolleagues and my principal.
I spent my first year teaching relentlessly chasing thisprize. I drilled, I practiced, I taught test-taking strategies. I made thestudents want to stay in for recess to practice testing by rewarding them withdollar store surprises and animal crackers. I begged and pleaded for parents toget their kids to school early and stay after for more standardized testreview. I thought that if my students had awesome test scores, I would earn theveneration I had yearned for. More importantly, I thought that this would provethat I was a good teacher. In reality, I lost sight of who I was and why I hadbecome a teacher. Oh, and my students test scores turned out to be pretty low,despite my sixty-hour work weeks and endless nights spent grading bubblesheets. In addition, at the end of the school year I was rated "minimallyeffective" due to my students’ low test scores.
I spent the summer after my first year reflecting on why I hadbecome a teacher and thought about quitting and traveling the world. But I soonrealized that it wasn't teaching that was the problem, it was the environment Iwas teaching in (not to mention I didn’t have enough money saved to even travellocally)--the high-stress intensity of the testing atmosphere, the"walking on eggshells" feeling that you get when you know somethingbad is going to happen despite any precautions you may have taken. I decided toscrap the entire test prep regimen that I thought, and was told, was crucial tostudent success. I figured I had one more year to improve my rating before beingterminated, so why not teach the way that I thought would be most effective,most compelling, and most beneficial to my students? Why not teach my studentsthe way that my best teachers had taught me?
Last year, for my students' sake as well as for my own, Itook the focus off of testing. I told my students that standardized testing wassomething that we had to do in order to prove to the city and to the nationthat they have good teachers and that they are learning at school, and myhead-strong group of fourth graders was determined to prove themselves. Ireassured them regularly that I would not refer to them by a label determinedby their test scores and that they were so smart and had so much knowledge thatthey did not need to worry about taking the silly old test. I treated the testas if it were just another thing on our fourth grade “to do” list. Thisconstant reassurance gave them confidence to take on the test, but it also tookthe emphasis off of the end-all-be-all aspect of high-stakes standardizedtesting.
With this weight off of our shoulders, I moved my students on tomore authentic learning. Genuine, meaningful learning cannot prosper when theburden of bubble sheets, arbitrary teacher firings and terms like “below basic”are clouding our brains. For the most part, I replaced weekly multiple-choiceassessments with projects that met the standards as well as met the students'interests. We read materials that sparked intellectual curiosity, debates, andcritical thinking. I stopped using the“preferred” textbooks and found ways to fund class sets of books and magazinesthat were engaging and appropriate for my demographic. In the end, their testscores were fine. No, I didn’t produce any miraculous increase in proficiencylevels, but these kids now know how to think, they gained content knowledge,they know a few things about the world around them, and they genuinely careabout learning more.
Critics of my anti-teaching-to-the-test approach often ask,“Well, how do you know that the students actually learned without looking atdata from their test scores?” I look at tons of data! I listen for conversation skills, I review projects, I read reports, I observe debates and discussions,and I use rubrics to assess skits and videos. Sure, I throw in somemultiple-choice style tests when appropriate and yes, I look at that data too.More importantly, I know that these students learned because they left my classwith authentic means to express and apply their knowledge. These students stillstop by my room to tell me what they are learning and doing in school. Theyvalue what I taught them because they see the importance of each lesson intheir everyday lives. Furthermore, they look to deepen their understanding oftopics of interest. They still ask me for help selecting books that will interestthem and help them expand their knowledge. Some of my former students stillcheck our class facebook page for extra learning activities to do at home. Theyask me questions like, “Ms. Chapman, do you have any friends who aredoctors/lawyers/engineers/authors that I could write to about how they gottheir careers?” Their fifth grade teacher informed me that during theearthquake, my previous students climbed under their desks because they hadlearned what to do during natural disasters by becoming “meteorologists” andwriting live weather reports in class last year.
I read somewhere that teachers whose students do not excelon high-stakes standardized tests are probably the best teachers. I don’t necessarily agree with that. However,I do believe that teaching to the test makes children dislike school and makesteachers loathe teaching. I have realized in my first three years of teaching that theaspects of public education that are “failing” are our current educationpolicies, reforms, and those who are pushing them, those who thinkthat spending large sums of money on testing and teacher evaluations will makechildren smarter. Then administrators continue the “failing” by pushing thesepolicies onto teachers, and in turn, so do the teachers who reluctantly chooseto go along with them.
My school did not make AYP again this year. We now have anew principal who never ceases to express his endless devotion to getting an80% pass rate on this year’s tests. I'm sure that my defiance of his test-prepregime, of his mandated ten multiple-choice question bi-weekly formativeassessments, and of his failure to see the students he is supposed to educate asanything more than test scores will cause great controversy. I have been warnedthat I walk on thin ice because of the test scores that are tied heavily to myevaluation. In spite of this, what I fear most is not a poor rating based on asingle test. What I fear most is failing my students and their community againby believing that my students' success and my own is based on teaching to that singletest.