Dear Mr. Pratt,
May I tell you about testing in Texas from my perspective having been a teacher, counselor, curriculum director, principal and school board member?
We need testing to see if children are learning, not to evaluate teachers, schools or districts. You can walk through a school and within a couple of hours you can tell if it is a good one. You can walk in a classroom, spend an hour and know whether the teacher is great, mediocre or poor. Annual high-stakes testing does nothing but put stress on administrators by the state, on teachers by administrators, and on children by teachers.
If it really improved education, I would be all for it but it forces teachers to make students practice all year to take a test. By the time students have done a million exercises on how to take the test, read the problems, use the tricks in reading, and write essays, there is precious little time to teach and the children have now grown to hate reading, writing, and math. (What a waste to teach a child to read if he never learns to enjoy it.)
Our schools definitely need to evaluate teaching and learning but it makes more sense to me to have the TEKS in a computer program with testing included in the program, staggered throughout the year. Students could take the tests as they mastered a set of objectives.
Most teachers want to teach and would like to create lessons to encourage learning and promote mastery of the concepts but their hands are tied by the dictates of the district administration office, the Texas Education Agency or the Department of Education. Most students want to learn until the creativity and curiosity are drilled out of them in our schools. Teachers should have the responsibility for teaching and students should have the responsibility for learning.
Instead of the futile effort of pretending that an annual assessment could tell us anything about how much students are learning, we should recognize and appreciate good teachers and remove poor ones. By the way, if you look into how much money the state has spent on those tests, you will find that that money would have gone a long way toward putting laptops in the hands of every child in Texas.
Thank you for your consideration of this huge problem.
Billie
Pratt responds:
Many fine points but I want to address this one: “You can walk through a school and within a couple of hours you can tell if it is a good one. You can walk in a classroom, spend an hour and know whether the teacher is great, mediocre or poor.”
Yes, some can but doing so requires a knowledge of what makes a good or bad school or teacher as well as requires that one care. Sadly the caring and the knowledge are not held by many in public education and the evidence of that is how many deny how bad some schools are in their care.
As to the stress of testing, so what? All of us have stress in our work and must meet inconvenient goals and performance targets.
I’ve interviewed very successful public school officials and teachers, with high scoring campuses, who dismiss this idea of teaching to a test or over-practice. Those are decisions made at a local level and are not caused by the testing itself. If classroom curriculum adequately covers the requirements in the TEKS, which it should, then testing on that material should not be something so out of line with the standard process of teaching and testing in a school.
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