The Road Beyond The Test

I missed this piece when it first ran at KQED's education tab Mind/Shift, but Katrina Schwartz's article is worth looking at because it captures some of the inaccurate thinking that still surrounds the Common Core today.

Entitled "How To Teach the Standards without Becoming Standardized," the piece patches together some interviews at EduCon with Diana Laufenberg and  some others. Laufenberg teaches at a Philadelphia magnet school and also tells people about project based learning and "structuring modern learning ecosystems."

This was back in spring of 2014, so they could still talk about teacher "ambivalence" toward the Core rather than, say, hatred, and it is organized around a list of ways to avoid becoming standardized in your teaching. As is usually the way with such pieces, the advice is diplomatically worded versions of "ignore the standards stuff and just follow best practices in your professional judgment."

For instance, #2 is "Teach students to question. When kids develop effective questioning techniques they become active partners in constructing learning." That doesn't really have anything to do with the Core; it's just a decent piece of teacher advice.

But buried amidst the educational wonder bread is a piece of bad advice that KQED liked well enough to turn into a pull quote, but which captures a major misconception about the Core. It's a Laufenberg quote, and while she says some sensible things elsewhere in the article, this is not one of them:

Teach past the test to this other meaningful, creative work and you will get the test, but you’ll get all this other stuff too.

I've heard this sentiment expressed many times over the past decade, particularly from administrators. It's a pretty thought, but it's wrong.

The assumption here is that the Really Good Stuff is just straight on past and on beyond the "get ready for the test" stuff. Like if you're starting from Chicago and you have to go Cleveland, but you really want to go to Pittsburgh, so you just stop in Cleveland then hop on I-76 and head to Pittsburgh. Easy peasy. Only the real analogy is, starting from Chicago you're required to go to Tampa, but you really want to go to Seattle. Tampa is not on the way, not even a little.

To get to good writing, you do not test-pleasing writing, just a little more so. Test writing and authentic quality writing are two entirely different things that just happen to have a superficial resemblance to each other because they look like words arranged in sentences arranged in paragraphs. But as a classroom teacher, I would literally tell my students, "I'm now going to teach you some things to use for testing, but you should not ever use these in any other writing situation." The behaviors needed to game a writing portion (e.g. parrot the prompt, use big words, write a bunch even if it's repetitious, never worry about accuracy or internal logic) are not desirable features in real writing.

Nor is the ability to respond immediately to a multiple-choice question about a short reading excerpt taken out of context a step on the path to mature, reflective analysis of a full-sized work of literature.

This notion that the path to the test is at best a small detour and after we've touched that base we can head on into the Land of Actual Education is a snare and a delusion. The path to test readiness is a dead end' the road goes no further and all that lies beyond is just a vast, barren wasteland.