A physician takes a position in a doctor’s office in an economically struggling community because she believes everyone should have access to quality health care. For this decision, she accepts a lower salary and more challenging working conditions.
But the doctor’s patients die earlier in their lives than those who have more money and more resources, and the government has decided mortality rates will be used to evaluate her performance as a doctor, her salary, and whether her office will remain open.
After remaining in the community and receiving poor evaluations from the government, the doctor gets a phone call from her medical school. Has she considered practicing medicine in a different town where the life expectancy of patients would be higher? Because the poor performance of her patients is putting the medical school at risk of having poor evaluations.
Yes, the medical school would be evaluated based on the health of the patients of their former graduates. This is devastating news, and the doctor considers leaving the practice and providing care for patients more likely to thrive because they have more economic resources – and her evaluations will look better.
This is what will happen to our education system if the latest proposal for teacher preparation regulations from the federal government is accepted. And the entire house of cards is balancing precariously upon one fulcrum: the testing regime. In the regime’s last-ditch effort to force us to quietly comply, they are pinning colleges of education against the wall: Make your graduates’ future students’ test scores improve, or else.
Though an individual teacher impacts only 1 to 14 percent of a child’s standardized test score, under these new regulations, the college of education where that teacher earned her degree will be held accountable for the child’s standardized test score.
The era of testing has failed miserably, but we can only begin undoing the damage — and rebuilding our k-12 students’ and families’ trust in and value from public education — when we call it quits on high-stakes testing.
If teachers don’t impact standardized test scores very much, what do they impact? Lives, motivation, understanding of content and concepts, non-standardized tests, grades, students’ willingness to learn, creativity, critical thinking, crucial skills for communication in the 21st century, and the ability for children and young people to see themselves as powerful actors in the world around them.
So why would policymakers want to keep high-stakes testing in place and embed it in the very fabric of the entire education system, from kindergarten through university teacher education?
Perhaps it’s pride. It must be difficult to admit billions of dollars have been given to corporations, millions of children retained and put at risk of dropping out, students denied diplomas, teachers punished, schools taken over or closed, education narrowed to test preparation, and parents and children tormented because a small group of people insist – against all evidence – that high-stakes testing is valuable.
Please, policymakers, don’t make the mistake of pinning colleges of education against the wall with test scores, and release the pressure from k-12 schools so they can implement the learning-focused instructional approaches they have learned in their teacher preparation programs.
