Anger, revenge and violence

This short story is titled The Sniper and was written by Liam O'Flaherty. I use this with students to discuss anger, revenge and violence.

by Liam O'Flaherty

The long June twilight faded into night. Dublin lay enveloped in darkness but for the dim light of the moon that shone through fleecy clouds, casting a pale light as of approaching dawn over the streets and the dark waters of the Liffey. Around the beleaguered Four Courts the heavy guns roared. Here and there through the city, machine guns and rifles broke the silence of the night, spasmodically, like dogs barking on lone farms. Republicans and Free Staters were waging civil war.

On a rooftop near O'Connell Bridge, a Republican sniper lay watching. Beside him lay his rifle and over his shoulders was slung a pair of field glasses. His face was the face of a student, thin and ascetic, but his eyes had the cold gleam of the fanatic. They were deep and thoughtful, the eyes of a man who is used to looking at death.

He was eating a sandwich hungrily. He had eaten nothing since morning. He had been too excited to eat. He finished the sandwich, and, taking a flask of whiskey from his pocket, he took a short drought. Then he returned the flask to his pocket. He paused for a moment, considering whether he should risk a smoke. It was dangerous. The flash might be seen in the darkness, and there were enemies watching. He decided to take the risk.

Placing a cigarette between his lips, he struck a match, inhaled the smoke hurriedly and put out the light. Almost immediately, a bullet flattened itself against the parapet of the roof. The sniper took another whiff and put out the cigarette. Then he swore softly and crawled away to the left.

Cautiously he raised himself and peered over the parapet. There was a flash and a bullet whizzed over his head. He dropped immediately. He had seen the flash. It came from the opposite side of the street.

He rolled over the roof to a chimney stack in the rear, and slowly drew himself up behind it, until his eyes were level with the top of the parapet. There was nothing to be seen--just the dim outline of the opposite housetop against the blue sky. His enemy was under cover.

Just then an armored car came across the bridge and advanced slowly up the street. It stopped on the opposite side of the street, fifty yards ahead. The sniper could hear the dull panting of the motor. His heart beat faster. It was an enemy car. He wanted to fire, but he knew it was useless. His bullets would never pierce the steel that covered the gray monster.

Then round the corner of a side street came an old woman, her head covered by a tattered shawl. She began to talk to the man in the turret of the car. She was pointing to the roof where the sniper lay. An informer.

The turret opened. A man's head and shoulders appeared, looking toward the sniper. The sniper raised his rifle and fired. The head fell heavily on the turret wall. The woman darted toward the side street. The sniper fired again. The woman whirled round and fell with a shriek into the gutter.

Suddenly from the opposite roof a shot rang out and the sniper dropped his rifle with a curse. The rifle clattered to the roof. The sniper thought the noise would wake the dead. He stooped to pick the rifle up. He couldn't lift it. His forearm was dead. "I'm hit," he muttered.

Dropping flat onto the roof, he crawled back to the parapet. With his left hand he felt the injured right forearm. The blood was oozing through the sleeve of his coat. There was no pain--just a deadened sensation, as if the arm had been cut off.

Quickly he drew his knife from his pocket, opened it on the breastwork of the parapet, and ripped open the sleeve. There was a small hole where the bullet had entered. On the other side there was no hole. The bullet had lodged in the bone. It must have fractured it. He bent the arm below the wound. the arm bent back easily. He ground his teeth to overcome the pain.

Then taking out his field dressing, he ripped open the packet with his knife. He broke the neck of the iodine bottle and let the bitter fluid drip into the wound. A paroxysm of pain swept through him. He placed the cotton wadding over the wound and wrapped the dressing over it. He tied the ends with his teeth.

Then he lay still against the parapet, and, closing his eyes, he made an effort of will to overcome the pain.

In the street beneath all was still. The armored car had retired speedily over the bridge, with the machine gunner's head hanging lifeless over the turret. The woman's corpse lay still in the gutter.

The sniper lay still for a long time nursing his wounded arm and planning escape. Morning must not find him wounded on the roof. The enemy on the opposite roof coverd his escape. He must kill that enemy and he could not use his rifle. He had only a revolver to do it. Then he thought of a plan.

Taking off his cap, he placed it over the muzzle of his rifle. Then he pushed the rifle slowly upward over the parapet, until the cap was visible from the opposite side of the street. Almost immediately there was a report, and a bullet pierced the center of the cap. The sniper slanted the rifle forward. The cap clipped down into the street. Then catching the rifle in the middle, the sniper dropped his left hand over the roof and let it hang, lifelessly. After a few moments he let the rifle drop to the street. Then he sank to the roof, dragging his hand with him.

Crawling quickly to his feet, he peered up at the corner of the roof. His ruse had succeeded. The other sniper, seeing the cap and rifle fall, thought that he had killed his man. He was now standing before a row of chimney pots, looking across, with his head clearly silhouetted against the western sky.

The Republican sniper smiled and lifted his revolver above the edge of the parapet. The distance was about fifty yards--a hard shot in the dim light, and his right arm was paining him like a thousand devils. He took a steady aim. His hand trembled with eagerness. Pressing his lips together, he took a deep breath through his nostrils and fired. He was almost deafened with the report and his arm shook with the recoil.

Then when the smoke cleared, he peered across and uttered a cry of joy. His enemy had been hit. He was reeling over the parapet in his death agony. He struggled to keep his feet, but he was slowly falling forward as if in a dream. The rifle fell from his grasp, hit the parapet, fell over, bounded off the pole of a barber's shop beneath and then clattered on the pavement.

Then the dying man on the roof crumpled up and fell forward. The body turned over and over in space and hit the ground with a dull thud. Then it lay still.

The sniper looked at his enemy falling and he shuddered. The lust of battle died in him. He became bitten by remorse. The sweat stood out in beads on his forehead. Weakened by his wound and the long summer day of fasting and watching on the roof, he revolted from the sight of the shattered mass of his dead enemy. His teeth chattered, he began to gibber to himself, cursing the war, cursing himself, cursing everybody.

He looked at the smoking revolver in his hand, and with an oath he hurled it to the roof at his feet. The revolver went off with a concussion and the bullet whizzed past the sniper's head. He was frightened back to his senses by the shock. His nerves steadied. The cloud of fear scattered from his mind and he laughed.

Taking the whiskey flask from his pocket, he emptied it a drought. He felt reckless under the influence of the spirit. He decided to leave the roof now and look for his company commander, to report. Everywhere around was quiet. There was not much danger in going through the streets. He picked up his revolver and put it in his pocket. Then he crawled down through the skylight to the house underneath.

When the sniper reached the laneway on the street level, he felt a sudden curiosity as to the identity of the enemy sniper whom he had killed. He decided that he was a good shot, whoever he was. He wondered did he know him. Perhaps he had been in his own company before the split in the army. He decided to risk going over to have a look at him. He peered around the corner into O'Connell Street. In the upper part of the street there was heavy firing, but around here all was quiet.

The sniper darted across the street. A machine gun tore up the ground around him with a hail of bullets, but he escaped. He threw himself face downward beside the corpse. The machine gun stopped.

Then the sniper turned over the dead body and looked into his brother's face.

Folly of teacher incentives

I found this on Larry Ferlazzo's blog here. It is a part of his list of Best Resources For Learning Why Teacher Merit Pay Is A Bad Idea. You can read all of my posts on merit pay here, and I strongly suggest you read Alfie Kohn's brilliant article on the folly of merit pay.

The Children in the Numbers

This was written by Kurtis Hewson and Jim Parson. Hewson is currently a Faculty of Education Associate at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta and an award-winning teacher and school administrator. Parsons is a professor with the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta with four decades of experience teaching, writing and researching at the post-secondary level. This first appeared in Education Canada Magazine here.

by Kurtis Hewson and Jim Parsons

The face that launched a thousand ships.”

“A picture is worth a thousand words.”

“The personal is political.”

Through the ages, astute observers have understood the extra motivation created by personalization. Establishing a human connection evokes emotion and is a powerful catalyst for motivation that inspires and moves us to action. The same is true in schools.

Student achievement goals are often rooted in numbers; but numbers seldom motivate humans working with humans. They hardly ever motivate teachers. In fact, numbers can hide our true goal as teachers: children’s learning. For example, consider the following “typical” learning goals established in schools in relation to improving student achievement:

“Our school is focusing on increasing the percentage of Grade 2 students achieving ‘acceptable’ on the district’s reading assessment from 72 percent to 80 percent over the next three years.”

“This year, our goal is to improve student absence rates from an average of 2.1 days absent to 1.5 days absent.”

“Over the next two years, we plan to decrease the number of suspensions related to male misbehaviour from 112 to 50.”

On the surface, there is little wrong with any of these three goal statements. Each statement meets the SMART criteria connected to effective goal development. Each is Specific, Measurable, Attainable,Relevant and Time-bound.[1] Each can be further developed with related strategies to promote attainment. The problem is that common school goals like these focus on overall averages, percentages, or totals. And that is where they can lack power. By emphasizing overall averages, percentages, or totals, two basic problems emerge: 1) numbers, rather than children, become the focus; and 2) subgroups or individual students can be hidden within the overall averages.

Focus on students

Sharratt and Fullan remind us, “We are wired to feel things for people, not for numbers.”[2] A goal like improving overall student absence rates from an average of 2.1 to 1.5 absent days may not inspire much passion or commitment. It is hard for teachers to get excited about making a difference for children when the focus is on nebulous “school averages.”

What if the issue were framed in the following way:

Last year, our overall student absence rate was 2.1 days per student from Grades 3 to 6. When examining our current student population of 300 students, actually 200 students missed less than a day all year! Another 50 students missed 2 or fewer days. However, 30 students missed 5-10 days and 20 students missed more than 10 days. We have compiled a list for each grade level of the students with 5-10 days absent, which are coloured yellow, and the students with more than 10 days, which are coloured red. Let’s start to talk about what actions we can be putting in place to specifically address these yellow- and red-coded students. Which yellow students can we reduce down to 2 or less days absent? With appropriate interventions, which red students could become yellow?

Such personalized focus shifts teachers’ conversations from general school-wide strategies to goals for specific students. Interventions can be established that focus on specific students and subgroups of heightened concern, and ongoing monitoring can be established to focus on individual student progress.

Consider this literacy example:

In previous years, the Grade 3 team used multiple measures to determine students who were reading at grade level upon entering and exiting Grade 3. Last year, we succeeded in raising students’ overall entry to exit progress from 75 percent to 82 percent, although students fell short of our goal of 85 percent overall. This year, the grade-level team will focus on individuals rather than the overall average. The team has found that 22 students entering Grade 3 are not yet reading at grade level. They posted these students’ pictures whenever they met as a Grade 3 team; and, by mid-year, they already knew that Susan, Michael, Philip, Esther, Frank, Desmond, and Cecilia were well on their way to reading at grade level. That only leaves another 15 students to place special attention and focus on for the remainder of the year.

It is easy to see that the approaches taken in the two examplespersonalize and make learning goals about children, not numbers. We are not suggesting that schools eliminate the formation of goals, and we subscribe to the power of SMART goals as foundations for sound school improvement. However, attempting to raise an overall school average by 5 percentage points likely will fail to elicit the commitment needed to succeed. By contrast, when specific students are identified and collectively targeted, the overall averages, percentages, and totals will take care of themselves. Teachers will expend tireless efforts when they see a difference being made for one child.

First steps

When starting to focus on children rather than faceless averages, consider using pictures. It is powerful when teachers see the faces of those children most in need of everyone’s support. We are not suggesting public displays that inherently ostracize children and families! But in closed staff or team meetings, sharing children’s photographs on PowerPoints or posters personalizes the goal.

We have experienced a celebratory final staff meeting where, rather than showing a bar graph of yearly school progress from 75 percent to 78 percent reading proficiency overall, photographs of students who moved from at-risk to at grade level were shared. The emotion and celebration among teachers was inspiring, and they shared success stories with each other and found it fulfilling to see for whom exactly they had made a difference. The buzz in the room also definitely motivated teachers to continue to build upon these successes. There were still students who needed help!

The importance of disaggregation

Moving from overall to individual analysis more than just inspires and creates purpose. It pulls back the veil to display children (and sub-groups of students) who can be lost when focusing upon overall averages. Consider Alan Blankstein’s observation:

Data represent all groups within a school. Overall averages can hide persistent problems that do not reveal themselves until the data are disaggregated in order to describe each group that makes up part of the student population. A school can take pride in the fact that its mean Grade 8 reading score is at the 72nd percentile, but that figure may hide evidence that although 10% of the class reads at the 99th percentile, a troubling 15% are reading below the 40th percentile. Unless this school examines disaggregated data, the needs of 15% of its students may be overlooked.”[3]

We further suggest that the “lost” 15 percent in Blankstein’s example should be individually identified, regularly monitored, and supported through specific interventions or focused strategies. In addition, sometimes successful overall scores and averages can foster or promote a degree of comfort (at best) or educational apathy (at worst) within a school. Our experience suggests that it can be difficult to create a sense of urgency for that small sub-group of students that remains at-risk when heralding the success of a superior overall average.

A school where 91 percent of students are proficient in reading has achieved an outstanding accomplishment. We should take time to celebrate this school success. Then, let’s go back to work! There remains nine percent of the population (almost one child in ten) still not achieving at grade level. Those children may be frustrated, upset, confused, hurting, and blocked from growing towards personal goals. We are still falling short of our mission to ensure success for all our students – each child.

Numbers distance; faces motivate. By remembering that a single child’s learning success is our ultimate teaching goal, schools can ensure the development of strong emotional connections between educators and their students that carry a sense of urgency. The faces of children should be the goals of our teaching – it is these young faces who will launch our ships.

Telling time with a Broken Clock: The trouble with standardized testing

Education Canada Magazine

June 2013

Telling Time with a Broken Clock: The trouble with standardized testing

"The more we learn about standardized testing, particularly in its high stakes incarnation, the more likely we are to be appalled." 

– Alfie Kohn 

What do standardized test scores really tell us? As with many public policy questions, this is a complex question – yet too many people assume to know its answer. Whole school jurisdictions and entire nations define themselves by their standardized test results, including provincially administered examinations and international instruments such as Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). All of these programs, justified by their so-called impartiality and objectivity, share the assumption that the scores must be the public's “transparent” window into the quality of our schools.



Best-selling author and blogger Seth Godin reminds us that the worst kind of clock is a clock that randomly runs a little fast or a little slow. "If there's no clock," Godin writes, "we go seeking the right time. But a wrong clock? We're going to be tempted to accept what it tells us."[1] Godin's message is that tracking the wrong data or misreading good data can get us into trouble. What if standardized test scores aren't telling us what we think they are telling us? What if the scores are illusions that are giving us false confidence? What if our reliance on standardized testing to judge our schools is like relying on a broken clock for time?

If education policy pundits (many of whom are not teachers) and politicians expect the public to trust the scores as prima facie evidence of the quality of teaching and learning that goes on in our schools, then the public needs to know more about the costs and consequences of standardized testing. It is time to move past our historic reliance on standardized testing programs driven by educational bureaucracies satisfied to measure what is easiest to measure. Canada’s already strong public school systems will not punch past their current levels of performance unless we move to a new approach to public assurance.

Measuring what matters least

Ask any parents what their long-term concerns and goals are for their children, and seldom will you hear about test scores and world rankings. Their concerns are compelling, existential and heartfelt. Parents want their kids to be happy, hard working, motivated, responsible, honest, empathetic, intelligent, collaborative, creative and courageous. Of course we want our children to grow academically, but we also want them to grow emotionally, socially and physically, and this requires a well-rounded education that cannot be evaluated by standardized tests. This is not an argument against academics, after all academics should play a large role in school -- however, even when it comes to numeracy and literacy, standardized tests tend to be limited to measuring forgettable facts while ignoring the higher level creative and critical thinking. It makes a lot of sense to question the scores when you know that the tests are an amazingly contrived and unrealistic form of assessment that measures what matters least. It’s time we shifted from valuing what we measure to measuring what we value.

Campbell’s Law

Well-known (but not well-known enough) in social science, Campbell's Law tells us that “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 was intended to monitor.”[2] In the case of standardized testing, corruption and distortion can come in a variety of ways. Here are three examples:

Teaching or testing? Teaching to the test and excessive test preparation invalidates inferences that can be drawn from the scores – yet they are the inevitable response to pressure to produce good test scores. Classroom time is devoured by not only the tests themselves but also practice tests, pre- and post-tests, field tests for the tests, benchmark tests, teacher tests, district tests, and state or provincial tests. Because testing is not teaching, this ultimately leads to a loss of opportunities for students to have a broad range of educational experiences, and the first things to go usually end up being the arts and physical activity – which do not lend themselves to be easily tested.

Learning or cheating? The moment low-stakes test scores are publicized to rank and sort teachers or schools, they become high-stakes tests. Where there is smoke, there is usually fire, and where there is high-stakes standardized testing, there is cheating. We can bemoan this inconvenience or play the blame game, but it won't change anything. When we stop and reflect on why cheaters cheat, systems thinking tells us that cheating has less to do with the characteristics of individual teachers or students and more to do with the priorities of schools and school systems.

Raising children or raising scores? When schools are encouraged to focus on test scores, some come to see children less as individuals of worth regardless of their academic ability, and more as score increasers and score suppressors. Sadly, the more the scores are made to count for teachers and schools, the more the scores count against the children who need the most help. They will be seen as undesirable; after all, they are the students most likely to score low, dragging down the school's ranking. This becomes even truer when (as in the U.S.) merit pay schemes marry teacher pay to the scores and/or when a school's reputation hinges on being publicly ranked. Under these twisted circumstance, schools may come to know more about raising scores than raising children.

We can no more skirt the real-world ramifications of Campbell's Law than Wile E. Coyote could avoid the punishing effects of gravity. Nichols and Berliner explains, "apparently, you can have (a) higher stakes and less certainty about the validity of assessment or (b) lower stakes and greater certainty about validity. But you are not likely to have both high stakes and high validity. Uncertainty about the meaning of test scores increases as the stakes attached to them become more severe."[3]

Socio-economics

Alfie Kohn begins his article “Fighting the Tests: A practical guide to rescuing our schools” by stating, "Don't let anyone tell you that standardized tests are not accurate measures. The truth of the matter is they offer a remarkably precise method for gauging the size of the houses near the school where the test was administered."[4] The inconvenient truth about standardized testing is that socioeconomic status is responsible for an overwhelming proportion (50 to 70 percent) of the variance in test scores. The strongest predictor of student performance on achievement tests is socio-economic status, which is why it is a mistake to believe that the scores tell us about school quality when really they are reflecting affluence or poverty.

No school or school system has ever become great without great teachers, but what can an excellent teacher do about a child who needs glasses, has cavities or is hungry? To say that teacher or school quality is the most important variable in education is at best naive. Education historian Diane Ravitch writes, "Reformers tell us that teachers are the most important influence within the school on student scores, and that is right. But the teacher contribution to scores is dwarfed by the influence of family and other out-of-school factors."[5]

Ultimately, great teachers make great schools, but great teachers can't do it alone – they require the support of an equitable society. If we are not careful, we risk misinterpreting the scores, and instead of waging war on poverty and inequity, we end up waging war on teachers and schools.

Dispelling the Corporate “Reform” Agenda

Finland's Pasi Sahlberg warns us about how the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) focuses schools on competition, standardization and test-based accountability. With GERM, "education has become a commodity where the efficiency of service delivery ultimately determines performance."[6]

Alongside the rush to introduce unproven technologies into classrooms, standardized testing in the United States has become a political instrument wielded by organizations such as Students First, Democrats for Education Reform and the American Legislative Exchange Council. Linking teacher pay to student test scores, and eliminating tenure and collective bargaining have become popular methods for undermining confidence in public schools so that education entrepreneurs can pour private equity and venture capital into companies that aim to profit from public education.

After a decade of intense standardized testing and sanctions under No Child Left Behind, California Democrats passed a resolution that aims at supporting public education and dispelling the corporate ‘reform’ agenda by stating, “the reform initiatives of Students First, rely on destructive anti-educator policies that do nothing for students but blame educators and their unions for the ills of society, make testing the goal of education, shatter communities by closing their public schools, and see public schools as potential profit centers and children as measurable commodities.”[7]

In the face of tough economic times, some governments might see this as a way of easing pressure on their beleaguered budgets; however, Diane Ravitch warns us that, "Our schools will not improve if we expect them to act like private, profit-seeking enterprises. Schools are not businesses; they are a public good. The goal of education is not to produce higher scores, but to educate children to become responsible people with well-developed minds and good character."[8]

Over the last two decades, the United States has proven to be a cautionary tale for how Canada, and the world, should not reform education, and Canadians would be wise not to think that the 49th Parallel offers any kind of inherent insulation from the corporate education reform agenda.

Building a better clock

The way forward is not to build schools that are a better version of yesterday. It is telling that the demand for standardized testing intensifies the further you get from classrooms, and yet authentic accountability and public assurance needs to happen within schools and communities, not driven by a tired-out model of bureaucratic accountability focused on compliance.

A move away from standardized testing is not a case for the absence of accountability – it is a pathway to supporting innovation and creativity. Ruth Sutton reminds us, "The issue is not whether we need information about the learning and achievement of our children and young people, but what kind of information we need, and how best to gather it."[9] Once we can see that standardized testing is like a broken clock, we can work together to figure out how to build a better clock.

Building a better clock and better schools starts with asking tough questions – which is precisely the spirit behind an Action Canada Task Force report titled Real Accountability or an Illusion of Success?[10] that invites Canadians to take a deeper look at the goals of public education and the role of standardized testing.

Alberta should be congratulated for their recent move away from their grade 3, 6 and 9 Provincial Achievement Tests. Now Alberta requires the courage to see that the replacement for the old tests should not be new tests. From a policy perspective, accountability models that are based on census testing of entire student populations do little to support student progress and are not cost effective. A shift from testing every student to a sample program using performance-based assessments would be less obstructive, cost less and provide more meaningful information.

Given the highly relational nature of the teaching and learning process, the best teachers know that assessment is not a spreadsheet; it's a conversation. They also know that there is no substitute for what teachers observe while their students are actively learning, and this is why the best assessments ask students to actually do something that is in a context and for a purpose. Unlike standardized tests which cannot provide anything more than a limited and incomplete snapshot of a student on a single day, a collection of performance assessments assembled in a learning portfolio can inform the teaching and learning process in a timely fashion, while simultaneously assuring the public that students are receiving a high quality education.

To enhance public assurance, Andy Hargreaves suggests departments of education should shift from a “bureaucratic accountability model to a locally focused, student-driven assurance model based on school-development plans and teachers as leaders in innovation.”[11] The means for accomplishing this can be found in programs like Alberta’s Initiative for School Improvement (AISI). A number of community-based school improvement initiatives such as AISI exist throughout Canada and yet are vulnerable to cuts by government, such as Alberta who recently axed AISI, that see times of fiscal belt-tightening as an excuse to reduce investments in innovation – precisely the wrong time to reduce support for creativity and risk-taking.

It might be argued that standardized testing has allowed us to build good enough schools; after all, even a broken clock is right twice a day. However, business guru Jim Collins reminds us that "good is the enemy of great." If we aspire to create a great school for all children, we need to seek an end to standardized testing and replace it with more sophisticated and more demanding processes for public assurance.

Notes

1 Seth Godin, "The worst kind of clock," Seth Godin (Blog), September 21, 2012, http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/09/the-worst-kind-of-clock.html.

2 Sharon Nichols and David Berliner, Collateral Damage: How high stakes testing corrupts America's schools (Massachusetts: Harvard Education Press, 2008), 26-27.

3 Nichols and Berliner, Collateral Damage, 27.

4 Alfie Kohn, “Fighting the Tests: A practical guide to rescuing our schools,” Phi Delta Kappan (January 2001). http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/ftt.htm.

5 Diane Ravitch, "Why VAM Is Junk Science," Diane Ravitch's Blog, July 16, 2012, http://dianeravitch.net/2012/07/16/why-vam-is-junk-science/.

6 Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish Lessons: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland? (New York, Teachers College Press, 2011),100.

7 The California Democratic Party, Resolution 13-04.47: Supporting California’s Public School and Dispelling the Corporate “Reform” Agenda (April 14, 2013).

8 Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 227-28.

9 Alberta Assessment Consortium, A New Look At Public Assurance: Imagining the possibilities for Alberta students. http://www.aac.ab.ca/resources/pdf/Public%20Assurance%20Doc_final_may31.pdf.

10 Real Accountability or An Illusion of Success? A Call to Review Standardized Testing in Ontario. Action Canada Task Force Report.

http://testingillusion.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/illusion_of_success_EN.pdf.

11 Andy Hargreaves, foreward to A Great School for All: Transforming education in Alberta (Edmonton: Barnett House, 2012).

Is standardized testing changing ME for the worse?

This was written by Bill Ferriter who teaches grade 6 language arts. He blogs here and tweets here. This post was first found here.

By Bill Ferriter

Blogger's Note: This was a tough post to write. It feels like a confession that I should probably just keep to myself -- but I gotta believe that other teachers of tested subjects are thinking the same thoughts as I am. While this isn't super polished, I hope it makes y'all think. More importantly, I hope y'all will still stand with me even after knowing how testing has changed who I am as both a person and a practitioner.

Bill

______________________

Regular Radical Readers know full well how I feel about the impact that standardized testing has had on education.

#notabigfan

#puttingitmildly

Having spent the past FOUR DAYS watching my students take multiple choice exam after multiple choice exam -- 10 HOURS of learning time that none of us will ever get back -- I'm wrestling with the moral consequences of teaching tested subjects again tonight.

You see, early on Monday I decided to start recording the spontaneous thoughts about testing that came to my mind over the course of the week on an index card that I carried in my back pocket. By the end of the day today, I had 10 different thoughts on my card -- and I honestly didn't much like what I saw.

Here are three thoughts that have me particularly troubled:

"I'm actually feeling pretty good about things! I know for a fact that I mentioned almost everything that was on my test."

This was my response to a buddy who asked how I was feeling after my students finished our science test on Wednesday. You see the trouble spot, don't you? Since when did mentioning things become a cause for celebration?

The answer is easy: Mentioning things is a cause for celebration when your end of grade exam covers a massive curriculum and measures progress by asking low-level, fact-driven questions. I definitely prioritized coverage over meaningful learning in the past few months even though I'm doubtful that my kids will remember much of what we learned in our short-sighted sprint to measurable glory.

I should be ashamed of that, shouldn't I? And as a guy who believes that true learning should inspire kids to change the world around them for the better, I am. But I am also relieved that nothing on the test would have caught my kids completely off guard.

#sheesh

"If they are going to evaluate me based on test scores, they'd also better find a way to spread out the special programs kids on our grade level."

Because of a nontraditional calendar, my school is broken into four groups of teachers and students that are called tracks. The track that I work on tends to have more students with learning disabilities than the other tracks simply because we have more special education teachers in the building while we are in session.

But because of limited budgets and positions, many of those students are mainstreamed into science classes -- the subject that I teach -- without any special services. And because of limited budgets and positions, our state didn't design any modified versions of the end of grade science exams for kids with significant learning disabilities. Every student took the exact same test.

That left me worrying about my evaluation scores, y'all. I should be ashamed of that, shouldn't I? And I am. Instead of seeing my students with disabilities as the unique, beautiful, capable people that they are, I saw them as a liability -- as kids that were likely to hurt my professional standing.

#sheesh

"I'm glad he thinks his kids struggled."

After our common exam was done, I crossed paths with another science teacher in our building who was pretty convinced that his kids had struggled on our common exam. He was definitely feeling defeated and I could tell that he was professionally down.

As a guy who is passionate about the power of Professional Learning Communities, I should have been there to lift him up, right? I should have been ready to lend a hand and to help him brainstorm ways that we could both improve our work together. I should have been a sounding board and a source of support -- of him as a practitioner and as a person.

But the first thing that popped into my head after our conversation was, "I'm glad he thinks his kids struggled. Maybe my scores will be better than his."

I should be ashamed of that, right? And I am. Collaboration with colleagues has helped me to become the teacher that I am today. My best instructional practices were polished with -- and by -- intellectually generous peers. But I'm more than a little convinced that my "me first" thinking is nothing short of an inevitable by-product of working in a state that has decided that competition between teachers for contract protections is a good idea.

#sheesh

Long story short: I'm starting to realize that standardized testing isn't just changing EDUCATION for the worse. It's changing ME for the worse. I wrestle with that reality every time troubled thoughts like these roll through my mind -- and I'm honestly not sure how to feel about myself as a practitioner anymore.