[Mb-civic] Let's Teach to the Test - Jay Mathews - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Let's Teach to the Test

By Jay Mathews
Monday, February 20, 2006; A21

All signs point to 2006 being a crucial year for testing in America, 
with the first national results from the new SAT due, as well as 
significant changes underway in how states use the tests that rate 
schools under the No Child Left Behind law. If only, then, we could 
figure out a way to speak clearly to each other about what we think of 
the many tests our children are taking. Let's start by trying to clarify 
what I consider the most deceptive phrase in education today: "teaching 
to the test."

Teaching to the test, you may have heard, is bad, very bad. I got 59.2 
million hits when I did a Google search for the phrase, and most of what 
I read was unfriendly. Teaching to the test made children sick, one 
article said. Others said it rendered test scores meaningless or had a 
dumbing effect on instruction. All of that confused me, since in 23 
years of visiting classrooms I have yet to see any teacher preparing 
kids for exams in ways that were not careful, sensible and likely to 
produce more learning.

There are, of course, ways to teach to the test that are bad for kids 
and that occur now and then in schools. Principals afraid that their 
scores would look bad have forced teachers to go over the same questions 
from old tests day after day, to prepare for some state assessment. But 
there is no evidence that this happens often. Strong teachers usually 
raise a ruckus, administrators back down and everybody goes back to the 
traditional lesson reviews that all good teachers use.

When we say "teaching to the test," we should acknowledge that we are 
usually not talking about those drill fests. Rather, we often use the 
phrase to refer to any course that prepares students for one of the 
annual state assessment exams required under the No Child Left Behind 
Act. For reasons that escape me, we never say a teacher is "teaching to 
the test" if she's using a test she wrote herself. We share the 
teacher's view that what she is doing is helping her students learn the 
material, not ace the test. But if she is preparing the class for an 
exam written by some outsider, the thinking goes, then she must be 
forced to adhere to someone else's views on teaching and thus is likely 
to present the material too quickly, too thinly, too prescriptively, too 
joylessly -- add your own favorite unattractive adverb.

Yet if you asked the thousands of educators who have written the 
questions for the state tests that allegedly produce all these terrible 
classroom practices, they would tell you their objective is the same as 
the classroom teacher's: to help kids learn. And if you watched the best 
teachers at work, as I have many times, you would see them treating the 
state test as nothing more than another useful guide and motivator, with 
no significant change in the way they present their lessons.

Those who complain are not really talking about teaching to the state 
test. Unless teachers sneak into the counseling office and steal a copy, 
which can get them fired, they don't know what's on the test. They are 
teaching not to the test but to the state standards -- a long list of 
things students are supposed to learn in each subject area, as approved 
by the state school board.

Hardly anybody complains about teaching to a standard. 
Teacher-turned-author Susan Ohanian is trying to change this, and she 
refers to all advocates of learning standards as "Standardistos." But 
she has not made much headway, mostly because standards make sense to 
parents like me. We are not usually included in discussions of testing 
policy, but we tend to vote in large numbers, and everybody knows that 
any governor or president who came out against standards for schools and 
learning would soon be looking for work in the private sector.

So why do we still talk about how terrible it is to teach to the test? I 
think it comes from our fear of the unknown. Those of us who are not 
teachers don't know what is going on in our children's classrooms. And 
teachers don't know what harm might come to them from the test results, 
as interpreted by often-wrongheaded people such as principals, 
superintendents, politicians and, particularly, parents.

Conversations about this would go more smoothly if we didn't have such 
distorted views of what teaching to the test means. We might instead 
turn the discussion to what methods of instruction work best or how much 
time our children should spend studying.

In some classes, such as the Advanced Placement, International 
Baccalaureate and Cambridge courses that have become popular in 
Washington area high schools, the need to prepare for a challenging exam 
outside of the teacher's control has often produced a remarkable new 
form of teamwork. Teacher and students work together to beat an exam 
that requires thought and analysis, not just memorization. If that is 
teaching to the test, let's have more of it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/19/AR2006021900976.html?nav=hcmodule
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