“Teachers count a lot. But reality counts too” (7).

Who's bashing Teachers and Public Schools, and What Can We Do About It?  -Stan Karp While listening to Stan Karp’s speech I was reminded of my margin note while reading Finn’s line “I’ve taught in public school in every level from elementary school through graduate school and no principal or chair or supervisor ever asked me whether what I was teaching on a particular day was in the curriculum.” –My annotation ‘Well Finn, things have changed!’   The problem is the people who are asking have little experience in education.  Is there a silenced dialogue in education?  Are the people who are in the classroom and involved in education not part of the discussion?  Of course bad teachers exist.  Is there a profession that is exempt from the occasional underachiever?   The reality is not all teachers are bad, and bad teaching is not the only obstacle hindering achievement.   Accountability is important. Schools and teachers need to respond effectively when the school is not serving the students in their community.  Karp reflects on his experience and says “parents are the key to creating that pressure.”  In my experiences I would have to agree with him.  The students’ who have parents pressuring the school to meet the need of their student usually get response “Finding ways to promote a kind of collaborative tension and partners, hip between these groups is one of the keys to school improvement” (6).   We had a conversation in class on Tuesday about the parent who doesn’t know how to dress for parent-teacher conferences so she stays home.  Could community outreach or PD surrounding increasing parental involvement be a better solution than making test scores carry more weight?   Finding ways to bridge this gap might lend itself to closing achievement gaps as well.  “There is no evidence that the test score gaps you read about constantly in the papers is linked to bad teaching, and there is overwhelming evidence that they closely reflect the inequalities of race, class, and opportunity that follows students to school.” (6).    NCLB is a little like the first question on the teaching tolerance survey.  It looks at all students with blinders on.  It screams Delpit’s first typical best intended statement: I want the same thing for every child, and as Johnson, Delpit, Kozal and Finn have repeatedly told us, this doesn’t work. THE TESTS-“If we spend as much on protecting children from poverty as we are willing to spend on testing children and evaluating teachers, we can reduce the problem considerably.’’ Stephen Krashen (6). Karp compares spending money on more tests to supplying thermometers in a malaria outbreak.     Rather than creating more instruments to measure achievement, the money would be better spent on solving the problems causing underachievement.  Accountability is necessary, but it needs to be real.  Test-based accountability is detrimental to the teaching profession and the education schools are providing, and according to Karp, it is ineffective “There is no research that shows paying teachers to raise test score improves…any of the positive school outcomes that policy makers say they seek.” (7). Fair test.org suggests placing too much value on standardized test scores and misusing the data inevitably leads to corruption.  …  “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. . . when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways.” Campbell’s Law, 1976 A few of their ideas: A focus on the subjects tested deemphasizes untested subjects and skills.    The subjects that are tested are valuable, but when schools and their curriculum hone in on tested material, or “teach to the test,” other subjects get left behind.    Students who do not perform well on these tests are labeled underachieving.  This devalues the students who are excelling in auto, tech courses, history, art and other subject where success is not measured by a test score.      Furthermore, any important skills or effective uses of class time that get pushed to the back burner to make time for test material are cheapened. Focusing on students most likely to make the jump from failing to passing neglects the rest. Hmmm…it leaves some children behind? There are subtler ways of cheating than erasing answers. The fact that the veracity of these tests must be questioned attests to the hefty weight they are on the shoulders of schools and teachers across the country.  Numerous indicators question their validity.  The same teachers receive inconsistent results when assessed by scores on two different standardized tests.  Bruce Baker condemns the accuracy of annual test because often lower income kids don’t learn as much in the summer as kids with higher incomes, thus testing once a year fallacious.                "The basic assumptions of these testing systems are at odds with the way real schools actually work and bending school practices because of them could negatively affect everything from the way students are assigned to classes, to the willingness of teachers to work with high needs populations to the collaborative professional nature that good schools depend on for their success”(8). Karp end his speech with a message that encapsulates what I was feeling following the Finn article, “In short, we don’t only need to fix our schools, we need to fix our democracy.”