Responding to Tough, round 2

The placement school I am currently at is preparing for the upcoming benchmark week. I have never heard the classification of standardized testing as benchmark week. After reading an article from The Notebook, (http://thenotebook.org/blog/102297/benchmark-time-again), it put me back in the testing environment. I can feel that the teachers and the principal at my school placement are nervously getting ready. In an “honors” math class, the teacher reminds her students, "If you do not know how to do a problem, study it, this will appear on the benchmark." My first reaction is, how does the teacher know exactly what is on the test? Aren't these testing measuring what the students should have learned and known over the years? An important theme I have noticed at my placement school is the emphasis of improving student learning, not necessarily a heavy focus on raising test scores. But is this a contradiction? Hoping to achieve and excel academically lead teachers pushing students to higher scores.

As many of us know, if not all of us, have gone through numerous standardized testing. For me, I do think standardized test scores aren't an accurate measure of learning. I believe that students find ways to learn and understand their own learning styles play a more important role than teaching students to score higher in standardized test. As Barahal writes, in “Thinking About Thinking”, "…just as an artist working with paint can create limitless hues and shades from just a few different colors, students move naturally among various thinking dispositions, blending or overlapping the various kinds of thinking" (299). Because everyone's learning style is unique, everyone's approach to academics is different so standardized test scores are not necessarily an accurate measure of learning.

Like ellenv, I agree that it is fair to be critical of Canada's emphasis on standardized test results. While I admire the fact that he expects to significantly improve his students' academic skills, and understand that standardized tests are an efficient way to uniformly evaluate students' performance, I find his obsession with results somewhat disturbing. Specifically, I took issue with the "drop-everything-and-cram campaign" as Terri Grey referred to it (150). This "boot camp" atmosphere with a focus on "training" students to perform was disturbing and contradicts what I see as being the purpose of school (146). Although some students, like Chastity WIlliams who was in Mr. U's early morning test-prep class, were motivated by the competition that inevitably comes with scores, I worry that other students are disillusioned by this emphasis on empirical results. While it may sound idealistic, I believe that an effective educational environment is one in which the teachers, students, and administrators form a community and engage in reciprocal learning. At the Promise Academy, the power dynamic between the teachers and the students makes me uncomfortable. Furthermore, as Grey points out "Test prep has started eating into classes like music and gym...this obsessive focus on tests was burning the kids out" (148). This is problematic for obvious reasons. 

Although I disagree with this emphasis on test results, I do appreciate the focus on students' success. Tough writes, "the school's teachers and administrators were focused on the students like no one had ever focused on them before, not only drilling them and testing them and disciplining them for every misstep they made, but also hugging them and congratulating them and encouraging" (143). Especially when the emphasis on "training" students is so great, this type of positive reinforcement is crucial. While Tough acknowledges that positive reinforcement was also a component of the Promise Academy, I wish that had been as evident as the pressure that was put on them to achieve.

Ellen- I think the question you pose "why do we always feel pressure to look for immediate success (measured through standardized test scores in this case) in education reform when the problems that have been plauging the system are established, persistent problems?" gets at the heart of a lot of what we have been talking about these past few classes. If deep systematic change will take time, are we left with having to work within the confines of the current system until something truly changes? Lately I have been thinking that we need to simply be more realistic and practical, but you are right to be critical of this approach and ask the question of where does that get us? If focusing on "working within the system" (i.e. emphasizing test scores) is one strategy, we should not only be thinking about how it is helping students succeed, but how it is also working toward that long term goal that Canada refers to (fixing a broken system and changing how we view education). Again, I am cautious of swaying too far toward the side of idealism, but I think it's hard to strike a balance. I had an interesting experience today at my field placement where I went from my history class, which is very progressive and emphasizes creativity and critical thinking, to an SAT prep course. The experience was truly jarring. I felt completely uninspired and saddened because I knew how bright and talented these students were, yet they had to sit for an hour during lunch and be told exactly how to take this test. Again, it's not ideal, but maybe until we reach the point where our country as a whole values a different type of education, we need to find a balance and compromise. 

I agree with a lot of the points you're making here, and before this year I was pretty pro-charter schools. Now that I've read and written so much about the school closings plan here in Philadelphia, I see it very differently. 

While the idea that less students in a school means more individualized attention, that definitely is not usually the case. With less students to teach, that means that more teachers will be laid off because they're not needed. Rather than smaller classes, classes stay at the same size, but there are more unused classrooms.

To your point about charter schools having less restrictions about what they teach, I agree that it can be a very positive thing. I remember in high school my teachers would always complain about the course restrictions from the school district over what they could teach. My hesitation is that many of these schools lack any kind of oversight. This was brought up in class last week, the surprise over how Canada barely had anyone checking what he was doing. I think oversight is hugely important in everything we do. It's how our government works, with each branch working together (sometimes...) to create a system that takes various viewpoints in to account. I think Canada lacked that at Promise Academy at times. His ideas about how to prepare students for the state tests differed from the first principal, Grey, but they never talked about it. They just avoided conflict by not talking about it, and nothing happened. I wonder what the test scores would have been if Canada and Grey collaborated more.

It's interesting, because No Child Left Behind was intended to create more oversight in education, particularly for teachers. Last semester, I took a politics and education class, and one student, a McBride scholar, said that at first she applauded NCLB for ensuring that her kids had great, or "highly qualified" teachers. She was glad that there would be tighter restrictions that would put her at ease. To me, the rapid growth of charter schools largely stems from the ability to bypass those strict oversights from the federal government. I'm not saying I think we need all of the restrictions that came from NCLB, but I wish there was a happy medium between intense oversight and complete freedom. 

Yes, the inequality in education financing is astounding. But equal funding would not be enough. My middle-class hometown in Massachusetts spends slightly less per pupil than the City of Boston. However, its test scores are so much higher that students from Boston are bused in through the Metco program- to a town with *less* education spending. To some extent, Boston is spending less on education if they are spending more on security, free lunches, etc. But I suspect the main difference is that in my town, parents provide additional resources that allow their children to thrive academically. So historically marginalized neighborhoods would need more money to close that gap, IF our goal is to get all students scoring the same on standardized tests.

This made me wonder what the spending per pupil at Harlem Children's Zone actually is. I did a bit of research suggesting a little over $19,000 per pupil, which would be more than most public schools but not much more. (For comparison; I just looked up tuition at my placement and it varies by grade from $19,500 to $32,625) although their expenditures per student could be higher. Given what HCZ is able offer, and given the influence of Wall Street millionaires on their board, I was actually expecting HCZ to be spending more than that. Still, I suppose they are saving money by using non-union labor.

Another question to making equal funding a reality would of course be where that funding should come from. It seems unlikely that it could come from government in the near future, although I would argue we should advocate for it. I'm not a fan of selling our schools to millionaires like the HCZ Board of Trustees.

And then another question would be if we were able to give ALL children equally good college-preparation, how would colleges finance the influx of low-income students submitting increasingly strong applications? I hypothesize that no colleges would remain need-blind in such a circumstance; so that even as poor and working class students' test-scores increased, their acceptance rates into college would not.

All of which goes to say: I definitely agree that increasing financing of education in poor neighborhoods is essential in our present society; but I do not believe that equal-funding of education could be a solution to unequal opportunities in society.