Six Tooele County elementary schools failed to make adequate yearly progress under the No Child Left Behind Act: Anna Smith, East, Harris, Middle Canyon, Rose Springs, and West. Last year nine schools didn’t make AYP.
My question: Should we care?
OK, I know these schools are in danger of having their federal funding cut, and we should care about that. But should we care about what the test results say about those schools, their students and their teachers?
I distinctly remember the days when we had standardized tests, back in my Indiana childhood. Our teacher would bring cookies or some sort of treat. We’d sit all day, filling in ovals with No. 2 pencils, reading questions and then waiting for the time to be up to move to the next section. It took days. And it was pretty boring.
Now that my school days are long past, I have to wonder what do standardized tests tell us? How good a student is at filling in ovals? How can a multiple-choice test judge whether someone has learned enough to be a high school graduate? How do standardized tests prepare our students for the real world?
Tests that only offer three or four choices are poor practice for life. You get points for picking the best answer, not using your skills to find the answer yourself.
What do teachers think of standardized testing? Does it help you become a better teacher or help truly measure the progress you’re making with students? Or do our teachers, underpaid and overworked, just “teach to the test,” while students send off their filled-out ovals into a vacuum, never to find out the right answers. That seems like a one-way street, rather than the “feedback loop” that helps students and teachers improve performance.
It is sad that funding is now tied so closely with test scores. I realize that we need some minimum standards, but is testing the only way to measure what our students are really learning?
Parents, teachers and local school districts should be in charge of what their pupils learn — not the federal government. And the pressure of testing should not take the place of real learning.
Ann Herron is a journalist and former associate professor at Utah State University who lives in Tooele. She can be reached at annherron@comcast.net.
Since it is very reasonable to some (many?) of the schools that are "failing" according to NCLB are really doing a great job overall, it begs the question, Why do we label them as failing? Yes, schools can improve. (I'm certainly not perfect in ANYTHING that I do.) And this law has provided some motivation for change at schools across the country. However, I fear that the law was never intended to improve schools.
I fear that this law was passed with clearly unattainable goals (100% of kids must eventually be proficient, even if they just moved into the district a year earlier?!?) so that the public school system in general could be labeled as failing. I fear that this was an attempt at the national level by private school and voucher advocates to change public opinion against the public school system.