Mike Petrilli (Fordham Institute) has started a substack of his own, and it only took the first full issue for me to disagree with him.
Petrilli takes issue with a piece from The74 from Jonna Perrillo and Andrew Newman, two English professors who correctly point out the role of the Big Standardized Test in squelching a love for reading. Petrilli puts the article under his "fail" heading, noting
Yet another article blames testing for taking the joy out of reading in high school English class—even though the state testing footprint at that level is minimal.
The state testing footprint at that level is minimal??!! I'm going to wave my 39 years in the classroom around here, spanning as it does the period before and during the rise of the BS Test. Mike, let me explain to you why I don't believe the testing footprint is remotely minimal.
Maybe you are thinking that the actual time spent testing is minimal, in which case we can debate the meaning of "minimal" in this context. I'll concede that the test does not take more than a handful of days out of the year.
But it's not the actual testing that does the damage.
You may recall that under No Child Left Behind, the goal was to have all students scoring at or above grade level (so, above average) by 2014, a goal that everyone in education immediately recognized as not humanly attainable. But the law was passed in 2001, so politicians argued that A) sure it was, B) someone would fix it before that happened, and C) they were going to be out of office by then, so not their problem.
The curve of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) was set so that for the first years the upward curve was slow and modest, maybe even attainable. Then as 2014 approached, the curve headed straight up a cliff. After 2010, there would be only two types of school districts in this country-- those that were failing and those that were lying. Meanwhile, failure meant public shaming ("Your school is In Need Of Improvement"), possible privatization, and possible funding cuts. That inevitable failure and the high stakes attached to it loomed over every decision that districts made in those years.
My own district was not unusual in how it handled things. At first we had some slack, and while we teachers fretted, administrators assured us that if we just did our jobs and taught well, the scores would take care of themselves.
After a couple of years, it became clear that such was not the case, and so administrators developed strategies.
One of the basics of assessment design is that you get the best measure by assessing what you teach, the way you teach it. Let's say you've practiced carrying pigeons in a bucket for two weeks; if the assessment is to carry weasels in a backpack, you've introduced extra variables, and you won't know if performance is related to students who relate very differently to weasels compared to pigeons, or if they encounter a whole different set of challenges with backpacks compared to buckets. Test what you teach.
The flip side of this is that if you don't get to design the assessment yourself, you can increase the odds of student achievement by matching instruction to the assessment. And in the face of the Big Standardized Test, that is exactly what schools across the country have done.
The BS Tests' handling of reading assessment has several significant features. Short excerpts from larger works. Multiple choice questions. And no time for reflection or digging in-- pick that correct answer RIGHT NOW!
A whole new, lucrative industry appeared dealing with test prep materials. Our instructional materials budget was shifted to test prep workbooks, all following a similar format. A reading excerpt no longer than a single page, faced with a short set of multiple choice questions that we were assured were very much in the BS Test vein. Like many teachers across the country, we got our marching orders which were to incorporate these practice books into our classes. What should we cut to make room for them? Well, the practice books would be so much more effective than reading through entire books. Do you really need to read the entirety of Romeo and Juliet or Lord of the Flies? And so our reading content was shifted to test prep.
Worse, the really heavy emphasis at test prep was aimed at students who were "at risk" for getting too low scores on the BS Test (as determined by the two pre-tests given during the year). The effective result of that targeting was that the students who were least likely to read entire works on their own had less-to-none of that experience in school. Double true if there was an administrator like our middle school principal who decided that at risk students would have double math and double reading instead of history and science.
So for an entire generation, "reading" was not the act of picking a book and diving into a world or subject that grabs your interest, but a parade of short disjointed excerpts that you learned to "read" not for enjoyment or understanding but to pick out the answers for multiple choice questions.
Can you argue that this was all the result of administrators and classroom teachers making bad choices? Maybe. Certainly the best administrators protected their schools form all this nonsense, but that required some guts because everything in the state and federal system pushed schools towards these bad choices. Can you argue that the joy of reading was free to thrive and survive through other avenues? Sure. But I'm still going to blame the Big Standardized Test for killing not only a certain amount of the joy of reading, but also a certain amount of reading competence, because we know that a background of content knowledge is also an important factor in reading proficiency, and you don't build up much of a body of knowledge bouncing back and forth between disconnected context-free reading excerpts. And one of the things that builds a joy of reading is feeling competent.
Mike, you can see why I didn't just leave this as a response on your post. I hope you can also see why, for someone who lived and taught through the rise of high stakes Big Standardized Testing, I don't consider its footprint remotely "minimal." We'll leave the other ill effects for discussion another day, but I remain certain that the single quickest and most effective reform we could deliver for public education would be to simply do away with the BS Test (both in its One Time and Mini Tests All Year) format. Good luck with the substack.
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