Why detest the test?

At a panel at Columbia University, an audience member asked education researcher Diane Ravitch whether parents should be concerned about “teachers teaching to the test.”

She gave a succinct response: “Depends on the test.”

In Georgia, the test is the CRCT. The state Department of Education expects teachers to teach to the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests because the exams are designed to measure whether elementary- and middle-school students have mastered the state’s new performance standards.

But as my e-mail makes clear, many teachers and parents question the legitimacy of the results and lament the time devoted to prepping students. Here, for example, are comments received after the news of the improved CRCT pass rates:

* “As a parent of a Georgia elementary student, I have to sadly report many teachers are teaching the test and not much else. My son’s class did well on the CRCT and why not — they practiced for an entire school year.”

*”The CRCT was altered after so many students performed poorly last year, and too many of the questions on the CRCT are well below grade level.”

* “My students are more than the sum total of their CRCT scores, yet that’s all my principal cares about so that’s all I spend my time doing.”

“I understand complaints about the frequency of testing, especially since some systems in Georgia impose standardized tests beyond the CRCT. And I share the concern that test scores are accorded greater weight than a child’s classroom performance.

But I don’t agree with the attacks on the basic value of testing.

Would any of us want a physician who didn’t pass the MCATs or a lawyer who failed the bar exam? Many Georgia parents argue that the driving test ought to be tougher so teens are better prepared for I-285. Consumer groups advocate for more rigorous licensing tests for home inspectors.

I’m not sure why the CRCT provoke such dread or why so much intense drilling occurs in the final weeks. If teachers have been teaching the state curriculum and assessing their students throughout the year to ensure they’re getting it, the annual test should be a cinch.

“Good teachers and good administrators understand that this is a process that happens all year long,” says Sue Snow, DOE associate superintendent of standards-based learning. “It should not be something that happens in the spring a week before the test. We don’t cram information down kids’ throats last minute.”

The fact that CRCT pass rates jumped this year reassures Snow and Melissa Fincher, DOE associate superintendent of assessment and accountability, that Georgia teachers are becoming comfortable with the state’s beefed-up curriculum and that more teachers are availing themselves of DOE resources on how to teach the material.

It dismays the two DOE officials that skeptics — including some fellow educators — credit the rise in CRCT pass rates this year to trickery rather than to extra effort by schools. (Of course, their case isn’t helped by the handful of administrators around the state charged with erasing wrong answers to make their schools look better.)

Fincher in particular is distressed about aspersions on results, citing the critical role of Georgia teachers in developing the test banks, the internal reviews by educators and a technical advisory committee and a detailed federal review. She suggests that wary teachers volunteer to serve on committees that create the CRCT so they can appreciate the thoroughness.

“We can stand behind the results and say they were because of increased student achievement,” she says.

Ideally, says Snow, schools should use CRCT results for more than assessing students. Schools should go through their results item by item, teacher by teacher. If one fifth-grade teacher had fantastic results on a portion of the math exam and her peers did not, it ought to inspire discussion among the colleagues to figure out what she’s doing so they can follow suit.

“We meet every year with groups of teachers who have outstanding results to find out what their practices were,” Snow says. “We have consistently found teachers who are very knowledgeable about curriculum, whose instruction day is very engaged with students and who use tasks that require students to work rather than having the teacher standing there talking about the work.”

Snow puzzles over teachers who insist the CRCT have robbed classrooms of creativity, innovation and hands-on learning since those very characteristics define the classrooms that excel on the tests. Yes, drilling is still necessary to conquer multiplication tables and equation solving, she says, but the Georgia standards also require that students wrestle with the math problems that they’ll encounter in daily life.

Snow’s comments reminded me of one of my great “Aha” moments. In my own experience teaching college journalism, I labored to be entertaining and lively and went into overdrive if I thought students in the back row were fading. Had I been able, I would have donned a top hat and tap shoes to regain their attention.

Years later, I heard guru Phillip C. Schlechty — author of “Working on the Work” — speak. As a new teacher, he recounted that he also thought it was his job to perform for students.

“I studied, I read and I put on a great performance for the kids,” he said. “What’s most effective is getting the kids to perform. What schools have to do is design work for kids to do so they’ll learn, not design work for teachers to do so kids will learn.”

If students are performing every day in class, then the CRCT ought to be just one more curtain call for them.