Paul Swanson is principal of West Elementary School in Mount Vernon. His commentary appeared in the Evansville Courier & Press.
Recent months in Indiana education have seen a contentious discussion about this spring’s ISTEP testing. As has been well documented, this spring testing was marred by crippling technological breakdowns by test company CTB McGraw Hill,calling into serious doubt the validity of test results. With potent consequences for students, parents, schools and teachers, whose paychecks are influenced by ISTEP scores in some districts, the test debacle has created chaos. Indiana students, parents and schools await the release of test results.
All this begs a larger question: How can it be that one test, provided by a company with a $95 million contract with the state, has come to represent the be-all, end-all measurement of education in Indiana?
This issue is so fundamental to education that it requires a response, one that hopefully will spark some reflection about current state policy and its effect on Indiana’s students and future.
Some policymakers speak glowingly of Indiana’s educational reforms and specifically about the new teacher evaluation system requiring teachers to focus even more of their instruction on the ISTEP test.
But what we are seeing in today’s Indiana — and likely across the country — is not school reform.
It is the quantification of education.
It is a system governed by the small but paralyzing idea that we can boil all that is done in a classroom down to a simple number. Indiana’s students and teachers are held hostage to the almighty test, a number that politicians and ambitious school administrators use to determine whether a teacher is effective. If large numbers of your students can pass the state administered test, a test costing Indiana taxpayers $95 million dollars over a four-year period, then you are a good teacher. If your students or school fares poorly on the test, your job is at risk.
It’s no better for students. In Indiana, a third-grade student who does not pass the IREAD test is forced to undergo retention, repeating third grade even if he/she has passed the ISTEP test. Families of students failing the ISTEP face the specter of a state that says their child is a failure, that their child doesn’t measure up to what the state of Indiana has in mind for them.
The by-products of this kind of high-pressure system are uniformly destructive. There is the very real risk that educators are forced to transform their schools into little more than score factories, where the object is not to enhance student learning or spark creativity, but simply to post a satisfactory number on ISTEP. Some Indiana schools have been relegated into scripted, unimaginative curricula, where daily lessons fixate on test-taking skills and accountability. Students in these building are commodities, and their stock is narrowly assessed through a lens of whether or not they can pass the test. Teachers in these buildings are not called upon to craft vibrant, engaging lessons. They need only make robotic efforts to drill kids into mere competence.
These schools are not centered on children. They are entirely focused on adults, be they principals and teachers fighting to keep their jobs, or politicians who use test numbers to boost their own electoral credentials.
We have to ask ourselves if any great mind from history — Thomas Jefferson, da Vinci, Galileo — would prosper in such a school. Would such a mind have a chance to explore, discuss, or ponder in a classroom whose mission is so stultifying?
It is not a stretch at all to see that current Indiana policymakers would not at all be interested in helping Jefferson explore the principles of the Declaration of Independence, nor would they hope that a school would fire the imagination of a young Einstein. These policymakers — who themselves never passed the ISTEP test — would only be interested in knowing if Jefferson could.
Fifth-grade students at a Southern Indiana school last year took campus tours of three local colleges and universities. “I never really wanted to go to college,” said one of the students, “until I got to see that campus.” Other schools provide students vibrant foreign language programs, exposure to cutting edge technology like ActiveTables and iPads, or support systems in the form of mentoring programs.
Where in Indiana’s vision of education does a teacher or school get credit for that? The current Indiana system sees it as irrelevant — the future doesn’t help pass the test. Or more succinctly, that student’s aspiration doesn’t help aspiring political figures boost their own credentials.
Think back on your favorite teacher. Do you feel that respect and admiration because that teacher helped you pass a test? Probably not. That teacher probably gave you life lessons that last a lot longer than a passing score on a state test.
We have to ask ourselves what kind of education system we need and want. Does the ability to pass a state-mandated test, graded by far away workers for the test company, truly measure the quality of an education? Is that the sole end of your hopes for your own child? My guess is that Indiana families know better than that.