A test worth teaching to: the race to fix America's broken system of standardized exams.

AuthorHeadden, Susan

When Caryn Voskuil first reported for duty at Washington, D.C.'s Charles Hart Middle School in 2009, she was a twenty-two-year-old first-time teacher from Green Bay, Wisconsin. With her head of long, fiery red hair, she looked so out of place in the predominantly black institution that one of her students asked, in apparent seriousness, whether she was a leprechaun. A struggling school in one of the capital's poorest neighborhoods, Hart had a reputation for violence, mismanagement, and low test scores: in 2008, only 17 percent of its students could read at grade level. But in Voskuil's three years at the school, Hart has made a modest turnaround: its test scores have begun inching up. For her part in that improvement, Voskuil--now a seasoned hand in the classroom--has been deemed a "highly effective teacher" and rewarded a substantial bonus. What's puzzling about Voskuil, and about American education today, is how conflicted she feels about what it means to be "highly effective."

Consider two different weeks in the life of Voskuil's classroom: early this March, she and her sixth-grade English students were making their way through a slim novel called Seedfolks. The book tells the story of a young Vietnamese immigrant girl in Cleveland who furtively plants six lima beans one day in a trash-strewn city lot. At first her neighbors spy on her with unalloyed suspicion. But once they realize what she's doing--that she isn't stashing drugs, money, or a weapon--they begin to feel responsible for keeping her seedlings alive. By the end of the book, the rat-infested lot has become a community garden.

"The value of the way I am teaching this week," said Voskuil, "is that kids are falling in love with books. They're making important connections between ideas and having this emotional connection with the narrators. They also get the satisfaction of starting and finishing an entire book, which is something many of them have never done."

And yet whenever Voskuil spends time teaching a novel--or grammar and syntax, for that matter--she says she feels a vague twinge. "I have the sense that this is not a meaningful use of my time," she says. "I have that sense because it's not going to be on the test."

The test in question--a standardized exam called the DC Comprehensive Assessment System (DC CAS), made up almost entirely of multiple-choice questions--was coming up in early April. And so the week after she taught Seedfolks, Voskuil's teaching style underwent a dramatic change. She began by physically rearranging the classroom: the students who had scored just below the "proficient" level on earlier tests were brought front and center; the students who had scored "below basic" were clustered in a small group near the window; and the few students who were already on record as proficient lined the perimeter, their desks facing the wall so they could work quietly on their own. Like a politician who spends all of her time in swing states, Voskuil wanted to concentrate on the students who were on the cusp.

Working within a tight agenda, with five-minute intervals marked by a stopwatch, Voskuil began drilling the group. Together, the students read aloud an eleven-paragraph text called "Penguins Are Funny Birds." Then they answered multiple-choice questions such as "According to the article, how do penguins 'fly through the water'? A.) They use their flippers to swim. B.) They dive from cliffs into the sea. C.) They are moved by ocean currents. D.) They glide across the ice on their bellies."

And why, Voskuil asked, is it important to read the italicized introduction that always accompanies such text passages? Because it's a summary, the group responded.

Finally, Voskuil handed out her students' scores from previous exams--eliciting reactions that ranged from apathy to sighs to celebration--and asked them to write down their "score goals" for the upcoming test. Remember, she told the sixth graders, "we are working toward a 3/3 on our DC CAS writing rubric."

Voskuil hates teaching like this. It's not that she fails to see the point, exactly. She knows that all this narrow drilling has, in fact, helped elevate her students' scores (though they are still very low) in the three years since she has been teaching. And she recognizes the test's value as a measure of some essential skills, and as a guarantor of her school's and her own accountability. But the assessments confine and dumb down her teaching. "You are not even allowed to be a teacher when they are testing," she says. "You are a drill sergeant."

In other words, Caryn Voskuil hates what has come to be known pejoratively as "teaching to the test." She's not alone. This kind of instruction fundamentally degrades the whole project of teaching and learning, many believe. It inevitably subjugates higher-order thinking--the kind that comes with, say, learning about character development and narrative logic, stretching one's vocabulary, and becoming familiar with common themes--to the coarse business of pattern recognition, mimicry, and rule following. This is a lament many Americans have come to take for granted in the years since the No Child Left Behind law (NCLB) was passed. Even reformers who believe in the broader project of standards and accountability seem to regard the matter of narrow-minded test prep as an embarrassing fly in the ointment.

Framing the problem of modern assessment this way makes perfect sense--until you consider that a couple of the most elite and highly regarded institutions of American secondary education involve a ton of what can only be described as teaching to the test. Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses are essentially yearlong exercises in test prep. Yet you rarely hear anyone complain about them as such. Why?

The difference lies in the tests themselves, and the kind of preparation they demand. A run-of-the-mill standardized exam like the DC CAS is a test of "basic skills." It asks students to do things like find the main idea of a text using a series of multiple-choice questions. An Advanced Placement test, by contrast, asks students to do things like analyze and interpret texts, construct logical explanations, and put facts in context, using a mix of multiple-choice, short-answer, and essay questions. All year, a student in AP American History is told what to expect on the final standardized exam: she knows she will need to become knowledgeable about a certain set of events spanning a certain period of time; she knows that memorizing a bunch of dates won't really help her, and that being able to explain cause and effect will. It's not that one model encourages "teaching to the test," and the other doesn't. It's that one model causes shallow learning to crowd out the deep, and the other doesn't.

In America, high-caliber tests like AP exams are usually the province of elite, high-achieving students on the college track. And so you might think that this two-tier assessment system is an inevitable result of inequality--that underprivileged kids wouldn't have a prayer on these more demanding tests. Yet the industrialized nations that consistently outshine the United States on measures of educational achievement--countries like Singapore and Australia--have used such assessments for students across the educational and socioeconomic spectrum for years. Although some are multiple-choice tests, most are made up of open-ended...

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