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Education: Standards and Assessments in Practice
Rob Montgomery
The Changing Face of American Education
In my nearly 15-year progression from teaching in a high school classroom to teaching future teachers in a university classroom, I�ve gained an unusual perspective on American education, one that led me to want to take stock of our currently standards- and test-obsessed climate. In 1995, as I began my teaching career, I was blissfully ignorant of both content standards and high-stakes standardized testing. I received my initial teacher certification that year from the state of Ohio, one of the first states to institute a benchmark, high-stakes exit exam for its students.
My university methods class in English/Language Arts had taught me how to write a lesson plan, structure a novel unit, and respond to student writing. But even though the Ohio 9th Grade Exit Exam had been instituted three years before, there was no talk of standards, content or otherwise, and no discussion, as far as I can remember, of teaching to the test. When I compare my own teacher-training and student teaching experiences with the teaching and research I have conducted recently, I see so few similarities between them that it almost appears I was trained for an entirely different profession.
When I received my first job later in 1995, teaching 9th and 10th grade English in California, nothing had changed fundamentally from my training in the Midwest. I know now that California had a curriculum framework for English/Language Arts (E/LA) in place at that time (specifically, 1985�s Model Curriculum Standards: Grades Nine Through Twelve), and this framework had grade level expectations for students, but I never would have guessed that from the materials handed to me at my new teacher orientation.
My department chair gave me two small binders, one for each grade level I was teaching. The 9th grade binder told me I would teach short stories, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Romeo & Juliet, and I was free to choose additional novels from the included reading list. Additionally, I was asked to teach a variety of literary terminology specific to prose (exposition, conflict, rising action, etc.), as well as the narrative essay.
My 10th grade binder looked much the same. I would teach poetry (and its related terminology), two core novels (Lord of the Flies and Black Boy), the persuasive essay, and the research paper. There was a general expectation in both grades to teach vocabulary and grammar, but no guidelines as to which words or concepts. That was the extent of the direction I was given as a 22-year-old teacher fresh off a plane from Ohio.
Six years later, the world had changed. When I returned to the classroom after a one-year stint in graduate school, California had instituted their brand-new curriculum frameworks and content standards. I now had an expansive, state-mandated list of items to cover with my students, running the gamut from vocabulary acquisition to public speaking. Students were tested on these standards, and 10th grade students now had to pass an exit exam in order to receive their diploma. In my district, course outlines had to be rewritten showing how every aspect of every class related to the standards. We adopted a textbook anthology that provided teachers with discussion questions, worksheets, and tests -- all tied directly to California�s content standards -- and we were encouraged to use these resources to ensure that we were meeting the standards.
Site administrators required teachers to conspicuously post the content standards that related to that day�s lesson, and they were diligent in spot-checking classrooms to ensure that the standards were, in fact, posted. Department meetings, staff meetings, and staff development days focused not on how to better meet student needs, but on how to better meet the content standards and their accompanying tests, apparently assuming that these two very different goals were actually one and the same.
As I became involved in teacher education -- working with pre-service teachers in E/LA at the graduate school level -- I saw that the emphasis on standards was not isolated to kindergarten through grade 12 education. I was required to instruct the student teachers in how to meet the content standards, and the students were asked to demonstrate this in their lesson planning. They were also asked to discuss the ways in which they met standards and objectives in their major teaching assessment, the Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT).
In the two years that I taught the Methods and Procedures course for the E/LA cohort, the student teachers reported that they felt pressure to meet the standards, and were constantly concerned that they were failing to live up to these state-mandated expectations. Additionally, no matter how successful they had become in developing their own lessons, most of the student teachers were required to shift gears completely in the weeks leading up to the spring standardized tests, abandoning literature and authentic writing assessments in lieu of isolated lessons on test preparation.
It is one thing, I have discovered, to be in favor of accountability, and another thing entirely to see what this accountability looks like in practice. For me, the school year would get hijacked once in March for the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE), and again in April for the series of Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) assessments. Spread over two weeks, the five days of STAR testing (covering the core content areas of English, Social Science, Science, and Mathematics) took up roughly half the school day, and required that the daily schedule be rearranged so that there would be some sort of equity in class meeting times. Predictably, the students were frazzled and exhausted after three to four hours of testing each day, so even though classes met for roughly the same amount of time, productivity was nearly zero. And, as with the CAHSEE, much time and energy was devoted to test preparation.
Additionally, teachers and administration had to come up with ways to get the students to take the test seriously. Unlike the CAHSEE, where graduation is contingent upon a passing score, there is no real reason for students to view the STAR as anything more than a hoop to jump through each spring. They are not punished for a poor performance, nor are they rewarded for an outstanding one. Hanging potential classification as a �Program Improvement� school over their heads isn�t a credible or meaningful threat, and since the Governor�s Scholarship program, which awarded top-performing students $1,000, lasted only three years, it is hard to find a good reason for students to expend effort on an assessment for which they receive nothing in return. In my observations, I�ve seen schools resort to various �carrots�: offering a carnival during school hours for students who improved their scores over the previous year, extending lunch time, or awarding gift cards from various local businesses. It is unclear if this actually did anything to boost student performance.
Bearing all of this in mind -- the overhaul of school curricula, the implementation of new tests, the drastic changes required of administrators, teachers, and students by high-stakes tests -- one crucial question has been left unasked by many and unanswered altogether: are the standards and tests, in their present form, promoting student learning? If they are not, it casts serious doubt on whether all the time and energy expended so far has been worth it, and raises troubling questions about the schools that have already received punitive measures under the mandates of NCLB.
Troubled by the changes I witnessed as a result of my own teaching experiences, I spent three years researching California�s system of standards and assessments. I focused on the twelve Literary Response and Analysis standards (the curricular tasks dealing with the study of literature) at the 9th and 10th grade level, analyzing them to determine just what they wanted students and teachers to know and be able to do with literature, and also examining the corresponding STAR test questions released by the state in an effort to see exactly what kind of knowledge of the standards was being measured.
As a result of this research (which also included interviews with practicing teachers), I worry that there is A) a disconnect between the content standards and what constitutes meaningful instruction in literature, and B) a lack of accuracy in the way the standards are assessed by the STAR.
My fear is that California�s current system of standards and assessments might represent nothing more than an empty gesture toward increased intellectual rigor and higher standards for graduation, but is, in reality, a sort of pseudo-literacy that sounds impressive, but falls apart under genuine scrutiny.
A practical example would be helpful. In my analysis of the standards, I found that, among other things, the standards often misrepresent (or even misunderstand) the way readers make meaning of texts. Standard 3.5 asks that students �compare works that express a universal theme and provide evidence to support the ideas in each work.� There are other problems with this standard, but most troublesome is the idea that texts �express� a theme. The implication of Standard 3.5 is that a student reads a text, and the theme immediately leaps from the pages, as though it were contained within and merely waiting to be released by the reader. This is a view of literature instruction with which many critics and well-informed teachers would disagree, as this approach seems to ignore the fact that not every student reads the same way, and therefore not all themes will exist equally for all students.
Louise Rosenblatt�s transactional theory of reading, with its notion that students interact with a text based on their own history and experience, allows for individual interpretations of texts, and the possibility that not every child will arrive at the same thematic understanding. Looked at in this way, the theme isn�t �expressed� by a text and received by a student; rather, the theme is arrived at after the student interacts with the text, applies his or her own knowledge, and arrives at an understanding. To put it another way, a theme isn�t found in a text; theme is imposed on a text by the reader during the process of constructing meaning.
Even if we were to adopt this extremely flawed and reductive view of how people read, and remembering that Standard 3.5 apparently allows for only one theme to be discussed, who gets to choose which theme is the �right� theme? In Huckleberry Finn, I can see how there could be a wide range of themes at which a student might arrive in his reading. A student could plausibly believe the novel to be about any one (or more) of these themes: the evils of slavery; the need to avoid hypocrisy; the debilitating effect of racial injustice; the importance of friendship; the perils of growing up; finding redemption in the wilderness. Are any of these more worthy of discussion than the others? Who makes that decision? The teacher? The students? And on what are they basing their decision? Standard 3.5 doesn�t see any of these issues as problematic, since apparently there is only one theme in a text, and you can find it there if only you look hard enough.
Ideally, the STAR test items that correspond with this standard would shed light on exactly what teachers should do with it. However, at the 9th grade level, the STAR does nothing to illuminate just what Standard 3.5 is after. In fact, it makes matters more difficult.
After reading two short texts (an excerpt from a prose passage about scuba diving, and a Noboa Polanco poem titled �Identity�), the students are asked to identify what �sense� is conveyed by each passage. This is, of course, not a question about theme. Asking students what sense they receive from a text indicates mood or tone. What it does not indicate is theme, in any way that I have ever taught the concept myself, or seen it taught by others.
This only reinforces my fear that the authors of the standards (and now, I see, the STAR) have themselves only a rudimentary knowledge of the concepts they have established as requisite student knowledge. How else to make sense of a test question supposedly assessing knowledge of theme that in fact has nothing whatsoever to do with theme? It is not entirely clear what the standard wants teachers to do, and this test question only serves to muddy the waters by implying that tone or mood are somehow comparable to theme.
It comes as a relief, then, that while I may not agree with the views embodied by the 10th grade questions, they at least possess a semblance of alignment with what I think the standard is asking of teachers and students. The problem, though, is that they do seem to adhere to the reductive view of reading and meaning-making that I believe Standard 3.5 embodies (that is, a single theme rests in the text and will be discovered by a competent reader). In two questions, students are asked to identify issues of theme dealing with two separate poems. In both cases, the questions make the assumption that students will read and arrive at the same theme as the test-makers. This ignores what we know about how readers read texts and make meaning of them, and is troublesome because a student could read the poems and understand them, but arrive at a different thematic interpretation than the one endorsed by the STAR.
The effect on the student, then, is that he believes his reading of the poems to be �wrong.� This is the problem with asking questions about theme and meaning on multiple-choice tests. We know that there can be variances in interpretation, but standards and tests (or at least these standards and tests) act as if there is only one �right� answer, and if you don�t agree with the test-makers, you will be penalized.
If we look to the test questions released by the state to clarify what is meant by each standard, here is what we can now conclude about Standard 3.5: At the 9th grade level, we learned that theme is roughly the same thing as tone and mood, and at the 10th grade level, we learned that theme is seen as singular and based on an authoritative reading of the text by a removed third party. For the released STAR test questions, only a third of them seemed to accurately assess the identified standard. In another third, I couldn�t figure out what they were assessing. My position to standards and assessments is not adversarial, but it strikes me that these results are simply not acceptable.
I have no problem with holding teachers and students to high standards, nor am I opposed to using some form of assessment to determine if they are meeting these standards. However, as I look back over the changes occurring in public education in the 15 years since I finished my teacher training, I don�t see the current system of standards and assessments as accomplishing much more than adding an additional level of bureaucracy to our schools. More to the point, if the Obama administration�s rhetoric is anything to go by, standards and assessments are here to stay.
Common core standards are currently in development, and there is talk of increased accountability for teachers (with tenure contingent on students� satisfactory test performance) as well as teacher-training programs. It is absolutely vital, then, if we are to buy into this system, that we see the standards as reflecting meaningful instructional tasks, and the assessments as accurately and thoughtfully evaluating student performance on those standards. For over a decade we have allowed these sweeping changes to take place, simply assuming that the existing standards and tests represent our best educational interests. Instead, the mandates made upon teachers should be held up to the same level of scrutiny as the teachers themselves.
Rob Montgomery is Assistant Professor of English Education at
Kennesaw State University. He is a National Writing Project
fellow specializing in pre-service English Education,
composition studies, and adolescent literacy.
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