One of the things that has damaged the School District of Philadelphia recently is an investigation into possible cheating on standardized tests at many schools. Philadelphia is far from alone in this problem. A Daily Kos post describes the ongoing controversy about former Washington, D.C. school chancellor Michelle Rhee. But I’m obviously following the story closer to home. Now, I have worked at two high schools in the School District, and in both cases, the staff was meticulous in following testing procedures. But as this story from The Notebook indicates, that is not the case at every school in the city.
This is one argument that’s used against the reliance on standardized tests. Once you make the test important – whether it’s important to students who need it to get into good schools, or important to teachers and administrators who need it to avoid penalties or earn rewards – then you are going to change behavior. Some of those changes are not against the rules, but they do distort what the test was supposed to measure in the first place. One example would be a student who enrolls in a test prep program to practice taking tests and learn strategies designed to boost the score. Another example would be teachers altering their curricula or lesson plans in order to emphasize areas that will be covered on the test. Other changes are going to violate the rules of the system, such as the instances mentioned in the Notebook story.
I think it’s a little dismissive of human beings’ ethical capacity to say that incentives will inevitable lead to massive rule-breaking. Society gives us plenty of incentives to have money, but we’re not all robbing banks. It’s certainly part of the picture – indeed, one need look no further than bankers to see the effects of incentives on people’s willingness to follow rules. But I don’t want to condemn all bankers any more than I want to condemn all teachers.
There is another level at which the current emphasis on testing can lead to cheating. Let’s say that you are a teacher and don’t believe that the standardized tests, as constructed, are a valid gauge of a student’s ability. Your judgment about what your students have learned is being superseded by a test developed by strangers. Your skill as a teacher is going to be measured by how your students do on this exercise. Your students will be judged to be proficient in reading or below basic skill level, and the results for your entire school community are going to be broadcast to the world. You could possibly accept all of those potentially harsh judgments and results if you believed in the validity of the test, if you believed that the struggles of today would lead to a success in the end.
But if you don’t, how can you accept it? How can you keep pushing forward to make yourself better when the system above you does not respect your efforts? How can you keep pushing your students to make themselves better when the system above them does not recognize their individual needs, challenges, and triumphs? When you feel ignored, abandoned, and disrespected, and then the system comes and asks you to follow all of their rules and help polish the boot that’s about to kick you in the backside, why should you go along with it?
I think that sense of disrespect and abandonment poisons the atmosphere in the national conversation we’re supposed to be having about education. It poisons the relationships between administrators and teachers. It poisons everything we try to achieve for the students we’re supposed to be here for in the first place. And it poisons the systems we rely on to make our judgments and decisions. As I look around my district and the nation today, that poison is everywhere – not just within the ranks of teachers or principals but in parents and voters and throughout the community. We’re never going to get anywhere until the poison is extracted, and we have a long way to go.