Tweedledee to Tweedledum: From FCAT to End-of-Course Exams
By Marion Brady
Maybe it’s because just about everybody older than 5 has been to school. Whatever the explanation, most people have an education-reform theory, and many aren’t reluctant to share them. Controversies about educating probably generate more letters to editors, more friction at school board meetings, more editorializing, and more pontificating by politicians and syndicated columnists, than any other single issue.
Interestingly, most of those myriad theories are valid. Given the size, complexity and diversity of school systems and the populations they serve, it’s possible to find evidence to support almost any reform proposal.
Yes, the “turnaround” approach used in Chicago by Arne Duncan, the new U.S. secretary of education – shutting down whole schools, or firing and replacing all the teachers and administrators – sometimes works. But it also often leaves an underlying nonschool problem unaddressed, or even makes a bad situation worse by seriously destabilizing a community.
Yes, replacing history, civics, art and other classes with hours of intensive reading drills may improve scores on reading tests. But if, as many teachers have discovered, those nonstop reading drills make kids hate reading, a battle has been won and a war lost.
Yes, lengthening the school day and year increases instructional time. But if that time is spent doing more of whatever brought the school to crisis, or if it screws up families by reducing employment opportunities for kids who are contributing to a marginal family income or caring for younger siblings, the lengthened school schedule can trigger a different set of problems.
Choose a Reform Strategy — Any Strategy
Choose any random education reform strategy. Sometimes it will work. Sometimes it won’t. Sometimes it will make a bad situation worse.
Everybody has a theory, but the ones that count are those in the heads of legislators, few of whom know much about educating.
An editorial in the Feb. 15 Orlando Sentinel reflects the current thinking on school improvement by Florida legislators:
“If a bill backed by a bipartisan group of state legislators gains steam, high-schoolers soon could say goodbye to the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. But they’d also say hello to new mathematics and science tests that they’d need to pass certain classes and earn course credit.”
The problem with most reform proposals is that they address effects rather than causes, symptoms rather than underlying problems. That’s what’s wrong with this particular proposal.
What was the problem the FCAT was originally put in place to address?
The least-charitable answer is that it was a back-door strategy to privatize public education. By setting in motion a process that required “annual yearly progress,” the math says that by 2014 the “failing” label could be hung on just about every school in Florida and the rest of America. That would “prove” that public schools couldn’t educate, and the general public would then be willing to hand them over to corporations (a process already well under way).
The most charitable explanation for adopting the FCAT is that it was a sincere effort to find out how well learners were learning, enabling educators to decide what to do next.
The Tail Wagging the Education Dog
Whatever the reason for the congressional mandate requiring the 50 states to test, those tests are now the tail wagging the education dog. And they’re all but useless. Their fans refuse to admit it – refuse even to debate the matter – but the incontrovertible fact is that the only thing standardized, machine-scored tests can measure with precision is a kid’s short-term memory. That particular thought process has some obvious uses, but none that would justify either the billions of dollars being funneled to the testing industry to measure it, or the time that teachers and learners are wasting getting ready to be measured.
What’s true for the FCAT will be equally true for end-of-course exams. An education is supposed to help kids learn to think better, and learner ability to think, really THINK, can’t be measured by standardized, machine-scored exams. Period. Full stop. No exceptions. No computer-graded test can determine the relative merit of a kid’s inferences, hypotheses, generalizations, value judgments, or any other important, real-world thought process. Second-guessing what was in the head of whoever wrote a particular multiple-choice question isn’t higher-order thinking.
If Florida joins 17 other states and switches from a single test to end-of-course exams for every subject, the only beneficiaries will be the testing companies. Their executives, anticipating big boosts in bonuses, think the switch is a great idea.
“But!” the reader protests, “without the FCAT or end-of-course tests, how can kids, teachers and schools be held accountable?”
We’re big into international comparisons, so we should learn from them. Currently, Finland is at the top of the international academic-performance heap. A few years ago, that wasn’t true. How did they do it?
They used a pretty simple strategy. They hire teachers from the cream of the academic crop, train them well, and leave them alone.
Revolutionary!
Marion Brady is a retired high school teacher, college professor and district-level administrator, and the author of textbooks, professional books, and journal articles. He is a frequent contributor to the Washington Post newspaper as a guest blogger. His website is www.MarionBrady.com.
