Good morning class! First thing's first: Check out this article, published yesterday in the New York Times.
It's not exactly good news.
The idea that only 23 percent of New York City high schoolers graduate "ready" for college is astounding. So immediately the talk turns to raising standards -- but this seems to be a superficial focus on the end result instead of a directed investment of more time and effort into understanding why the education itself isn't working. It puts the burden on teachers and students to slave over what the answers on the tests will be instead of focusing on why so many kids are failing the set standards. We aren't adjusting education to fit their needs; we're attempting to adjust objective expectations to fit a subjective situation.
These findings also call into question how the standards have changed (indeed, the article even suggests the standards will change again in reaction to these findings); quality of the standards aside, how can we hope to measure success objectively if what we're measuring is constantly shifting? We leave ourselves with no foundation, no ground to get our bearings.
The "shock and hesitation" from local officials would almost be laughable if the article didn't go on to suggest that their primary concern is that real estate value will be affected. It says volumes about the importance placed on the (indirect, more lucrative) end result of education as opposed to the actual process.
And this just seems like wishful thinking: "City education officials said the 23 percent college-ready rate was not a fair measure of how the city would do if graduation requirements were raised to a higher standard, because students would work harder to meet that new bar." Um, what are you smoking, and can I please have some? It's like we're saying, "Sure, the kids aren't meeting the lower standards, but if we raise them then they'll snap out of it and get in gear! There's no way it could backfire and in reality push kids further behind by overwhelming them even more." It's like we have no idea what we're doing.
Am I wrong? Am I overlooking something? Assuming that we like the fact that education is free and available to all in this country, this "new" problem raises the old questions that are central to the education debate: How can we manage American education by setting objective standards in a completely subjective situation? What kind of test can be a probing and comprehensive evaluation of a student's understanding of subject matter? If we can't rely on standardized testing, how do we know kids in the Bronx and Houston and Nashville are getting the same quality of education as kids in LA County and Iowa City and Youngstown? A bar is necessary; how and where do we set it, and then how do we get as many kids over it as possible?
There are far more questions than answers. But one thing is certain: Students aren't failing. The schools are.
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UPDATE, 2:09 pm: My teaching writing professor sent this article out to our class a few days ago, but I didn't read it until after composing this post. I'm only just beginning to understand how far-reaching the context of this debate is, but I'll be really interested to see what -- if anything -- happens July 28-31 in Washington, DC. And I'm bookmarking John Taylor Gatto's 2008 essay for some light bedtime reading later this week.
The New York public school system and the design of the Regents exams is a classic example of a system set up to enable students to pass a test, but not necessarily prepare them for life after high school.
ReplyDeleteThe exams are very formulaic, and it's easy to predict what the questions will be in a given year - making it even easier to teach to the test. For example, the English Regents. It's a 6 hour test, given at the end of 11th grade. It has four essays on it - a listening, a reading comp, a persuasive, and a compare and contrast. 9th-11th grade was spent learning how to write these four essays. Did I feel prepared for writing in college and beyond? Ask anyone, I'm least confident in my writing abilities.
I used the English regents as an example, but the rest were similar. I'd love for them to abolish the system, but that won't happen. The exams are given at the very end of the school year - maybe moving them to March would allow teachers to teach to the test, and then a few months afterward to teach college-level material. Of course, that doesn't help when exam prep lasts three years.
On a similar note -- most of my English teachers in high school did an awful job teaching how to write an effective argument. What's worse is that one made it such a mechanical exercise that I nearly quit the course (it was a summer class). I attribute my writing ability today more to emulation of things that I have read in the past, rather than what teachers were trying to give me.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with the teachers? They were too concerned with the state exam standards and AP Language/Literature writing proofs.