STOP TRASHING STUDENT TESTING

I became engaged in a fascinating discussion in a discussion group in the Google Circle, Education Revolution. A participant introduced the subject of student testing with the statement, “Children aged four will be tested at school, under Government plans”, which referenced an article by Ian Johnston. A person responded immediately to this with;

“This is awful. Exam stress is bad enough when you are old enough to know that stress is a necessary part of life and know how to deal with stresses. But to put exam stress on children so young is appalling. These exams won't even mean anything in their adult life, so why put this strain on them? Why can't children just be allowed to be children? Exams are not something 4 year olds should be concerned with.”

I followed with this comment;  “My only comment is that you must have struggled mightily to find something wrong with Ian Johnston’s article if what it produced in your mind was this comment: “Children aged four will be tested at school, under Government plans.” Then tie this to stress as if “testing” is mistreatment equivalent to corporal punishment. This is a case where the “pervasive hate the government” rhetoric expressed in your comment can be proven empty simply by reading the article.

I received the following comment in response; “If you think that testing children at aged four is something we should be proud of then we are very much on a different page, to the point that anything I say here will likely go beyond you.” Finally, another participant revealed the truth of the matter: “The only purpose of this (sic-test four year olds) is to create simplistic, entirely unscientific targets the students must reach, many years later. These targets will then be used to hold to account whoever happens to be teaching each child when the music stops. It's just a way of continuing to bully teachers, rather than spend money tackling social problems.

This final comment, in my opinion, is at the heart of our problems in education. People who teach are afraid of being evaluated. I was careful not to use the words ‘people who teach’ as opposed to the word ‘teachers’ in the last sentence. There is no profession in which meritocracy counts more. When I lived in the third world, expatriates refused to send their children to government schools. This put the parents in between “a rock and a hard place”; private schools did not exist except in the United States and were prohibitively expensive. In addition, most did not want to send their children away. The quick answer was “home schooling”. Suddenly, some of these people seem to think four years of study in colleges of education that teachers have, is not needed; they would teach their own children what they needed to know. Some applied for home schooling material, which is expensive but not prohibitively so. Shock set in when these parents realized how much effort they would have to devote to the students. What is important in this context is, they found out how difficult it is to teach when their children were tested. The point is that the testing, designed to evaluated student, evaluated the parents as well.

As a college professor for a lifetime, I found out that my colleagues hated student evaluations. Most people seem not to know professors are not trained as teachers; except of course those in the college of education. They do not know how to organize material and lecture in a meaningful way, nor do they know how to write tests. The result is that many professors do a rotten job and the students know it and are not afraid to say so in their evaluations. The result is that what they, the professors who want to be liked by the students, do is make the tests progressively easier, present less and less material, and give inflated grades. The result is that the most experience professors teach the narrowest subjects in graduate courses—usually limited to only one small aspect of their subject area leaving teaching of the general courses to the least qualified inexperienced teaching assistants. The years of experience a professor has are obviously most valuable in the general course. Worst of all the professors have no way of knowing if they did a good job or not because they have rendered testing useless—to protect their own incompetence.

Move into the primary education, K -12, and you find teachers unions.  Union leaders demand bargaining power and to get that power they need members. To get and keep members they have changed the meaning of tenure from protecting the “rights of teachers to teach all subjects” to job protection. The fact that teachers unions have succumbed to the wishes of incompetent teachers for job protection has not only destroyed union effectiveness but has trashed the reputation of unions in the eyes of many people.

 As the last commentator mentioned in the above exchange, testing might reveal teachers incompetence: therefore, in my interpretation of what he wrote is; testing is bad no matter where you find it. I repeat from what he wrote; “These targets (sec: evaluation of what the tests measured) will then be used to hold to account whoever happens to be teaching each child when the music stops. It's just a way of continuing to bully teachers, rather than spend money tackling social problems.”

Testing has multiple objectives. The principle one is to find how best to use the precious little time teachers have with students. The second objective is conscientious teachers to learn which teaching methods works best and then work “hard” to improve those methods. The third objective, and an important one, is for teacher and program self-evolution. The final objective is for school administrators and parents to know which teachers deserve to teach and which ones are in the wrong profession. 

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