My friend Kerri is student teaching in Houston this semester. Every week she writes an editorial for her hometown newspaper in Spalding, Nebraska. This is the latest edition.
Dear Nebraska,
You've made Texas jealous for six
seasons.
You were far
superior at teaching your students for six rounds of No Child Left Behind
testing, and under the leadership of Commissioner for Education Doug
Christensen, you did it very, very well: some of the best teaching and learning
in the nation for some of the lowest pay.
Here in Texas, educators
salivated for a system like the one you had, with district-mandated assessment
and a commissioner who worked on behalf of teachers. A true team, working for
on behalf of student learning.
But on April 10, LB
1157 was approved, giving the State Board and a small subcommittee control over
an all-in-one battery of tests for Nebraskan students in math, science,
reading, and writing: exactly the policies that Commissioner Christensen and teachers
oppose.
See, local tests –
quizzes, papers, things your teacher grades – are designed around the
curriculum to tell whether students have learned from lessons. High-stakes
tests, especially in sub-par districts, tell states whether teachers have
adequately predicted a test and prepared their students to fill in the bubbles
or write in the boxes.
By the very nature
of The Test, engaged learning will inevitably be sacrificed in favor of Test
preparation. Texas
knows. Teachers here were jealous.
Currently finishing
my student-teaching in Houston
– in a card-carrying Leave-No-Child state – I have learned much about the
nature of this profession. A teacher makes 4,000 decisions a day. That's about
one per second: who to call on, who not to, will you write a pass? Will you
emphasize context clues or dictionary usage when Syan wants to know what
"lucid" means? Then, decide on lesson planning, notes to parents,
grades (oh, grades), and team collaboration. If you coach, let's be stingy and
say you make twice as many.
No part of teaching
is mechanical except the bell ringing in 50 minutes, and you can't practice for
the moments when your students, in the middle of a short story, ask how HIV is
transmitted. They will ask.
It's not just a
teacher's job to answer. It's a community's moral responsibility to answer its
youth truthfully, to decide what's best for the young minds in their care. And
those closest to them know best. As teachers and districts, we know our
students, their parents, their after-school activities, their aspirations,
their skills, and their character. We can build the curriculum to strengthen
their weaknesses and flaunt their strengths as individuals. Districts know the
needs of their specific students better than the five appointees who will serve
on the State subcommittee. Texas
was jealous that our educational system echoed this philosophy.
But the bill would
allow for comparison among schools! advocates cry.
Nebraska! I cry more loudly, This is not a positive
attribute of the bill!
Whenever you
initiate a state Test, some schools won't test as well as others, and those
schools get pressured to improve. Best-case scenario: nobody wants
"low-performing" or "fourth-tier" on a resume. Worst-case:
school closing. Cut funding. Open enrollment. The battle scars of NCLB.
In all cases,
administrators within lower-performing districts must serve the State, no
longer the students. It becomes a game of allegiances, essentially, and LB1157
serves Washington, not Andrew, Jennifer, and Marie.
If your district
doesn't do well, you'll adopt a new curriculum. I've seen it. From January to
March every year, my cooperating teachers teach The Test. Nine weeks. If you
teach math or science in my district, 16 weeks. Even the best students come to
school with enthusiasm comparable to catfish's. I wince to think of what else
we could be teaching while discovery is replaced by disinterest.
What you don't understand,
legislators, is that these students are not learning more. They're testing,
testing, testing. 35 kids per class, one teacher, and they're testing again. This
is the fate of a school that didn't do as well on The Test as the all-white,
upper-class, home-owner districts up I-10.
Don't pretend, Nebraska, that you won't
see similar socioeconomic inequities among test-takers. Assess per-pupil
spending and teacher pay across Nebraska,
and take a guess how the score card will look. Spalding, do you want the same
Test that Kearney
has? Cozad? Lincoln?
Lexington? West Omaha? North Omaha?
Education must be
beyond comparison. The institution of education is to serve students as
individuals, and districts know best what their demographics need. In our
post-9/11, NCLB world, we cannot accept the idea that education is a
competition, when competition tugs at the integrity of the institution as a
whole. We say, "leave no child" when LB 1157, like all bills of the sort, only
waves into the rearview to the children we've left. No funding to help those
deemed quantifiably inferior, not a word about quality first-line instruction
or supplemental courses, only testing and its deformed curriculum for the students
we are supposed to be serving.
I was proud of you,
Nebraska. You
were the last frontier in local NCLB assessment.
Or maybe the State
Board will consider giving poorer-scoring schools more money to hire quality
teachers and shrink class sizes, tactics that have proven effective time and
again in promoting student learning. That would keep Texas jealous.
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