The opinion piece “Cheating, What cheating?” by The Washington Post’s education columnist Jay Mathews addresses the issue of cheating on the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System tests, the tests the District of Columbia uses to evaluate student progress in accordance with No Child Left Behind. Mathews begins his commentary by looking at the data from the Bruce-Monroe Elementary School in Washington, DC, whose test scores declined despite the implementation of a new math program. While the school gave multiple reasons for the decline in scores such as high teacher turnover, lack of funding etc., Mathews suggests that readers consider the first reason that came to his mind: a potential increase in test security at the school. While Mathews does not provide the data of erasure marks on the exams, he does note that the school was flagged in 2009 for having “an above average rate of wrong-to-write erasures”. Generally, Mathews writes that even though we know this is happening in multiple schools and districts, not much is being done to address the problem. He notes that nothing was asked of Kiya Henderson during her confirmation hearings of how she would be handling the cheating scandals. It does not seem to be a mainstream issue of concern. Mathews suggests that failing to look at these issues has significant long term effects, most importantly as to misappropriating resources and attention when it comes to school that really need those things
As a teacher in Baltimore City, I am familiar with stories of similar things happening in our own school district; there are rumors of schools being investigated, administrators being fired and the like. I know that I was required to follow strict procedures at my school after my kids took their Stanford Ten to ensure that the test books were closely monitored at all times. However, what this article really makes me think about is priorities. It seems to me that educational priorities must be seriously out of order if school administrators in any district would rather falsify data, which is both unethical and detrimental to student achievement, than accept and tackle the true realities of their classrooms. We constantly hear about how data is essential to student achievement but has our obsession with numbers become so great that it is an obstacle to true education? We run into this same dilemma when we discuss test preparation or curriculum development along with a state or city level standardized test. There is so much pressure to do well and achieve that in many ways, some of the purpose of education is lost. It seems to me that this loss of purpose can be directly linked to the fact that the policies that exist allow for the focus to be on numbers and measurement, rather than actual student achievement. Thus, while we can each work to fix this in our own classrooms by producing well educated, well-rounded students, our system as a whole cannot foster this whole child education until our testing procedures are adjusted or fundamentally changed. If policies are not changed, we are ultimately failing to recognize and reward many positive things going on in classrooms across the nation and losing much of the potential of what a good education can do for a child.
1 comment:
I completely see the point that America has allowed its obsession with achievement on standardized tests to cloud the true goal of education: creating a well-rounded student. At the same time, I see the reason standardized testing came about in the first place. We need to check that students can do basic things before moving on in education. If a 12th grader really can't read some passages and answer some questions on an 8th-grade level test (which is what the HSA is...) but they are graduating, I think we should be concerned. Not only is such a student not well-rounded, they're not prepared for reading on a college level. As a Montgomery County student, we took the HSA with little preparation and then went back to discussions of literature and extensive lab experiments. Our schooling was so strong that there was little concern that we would not pass the tests. Most of us were well-beyond HSA skills.
What if the cheating scandals come from the idea that standardized tests are testing things that do not really matter? Surely some standardized tests are drivel (BCPS Benchmarks are full of errors and poorly-written questions), but there ARE valid tests that assess valid skills our students should have. Testing scores are not what education amounts to, but they're an important check on education. The fact that so many students are struggling to pass rather basic tests says more about the poor quality of education they are receiving year by year than the "over-obsession" with tests.
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