© 2016 Michael Swickard, Ph.D.
Worse, we spend incredible amounts
of money on testing and administrators. We are spending money to have a problem.
The teachers know that the system is corrupt and does not serve the students
but can’t be heard over the administrators feathering their nests.
The new accountability numbers are
out from the New Mexico Public Education Department and like all years before
we in the public know nothing after seeing the numbers. To most people it is a
list of monkey points that each school has earned with no understanding of what
the numbers mean.
Schools go up and down on the scale
and it is the average of the school so it doesn’t really tell us anything about
individual teachers or classes. After looking at the numbers I know nothing about
any school.
At the core is the notion that
administrators can improve the education of students by making them spend most
of their time learning how to juke the testing system. We see the
administrators say that testing is only a couple of days a year which is false.
Testing is every day and all day. It
is the “Be all and end all” of every data meeting that teachers must attend.
Testing holds no interest to students. Day after day, hour after hour students
are preparing to take tests that mean nothing to them about subjects to which
they are not interested.
Teachers have a personal battle to
try to keep something interesting in their classes while being pushed to only
focus on tested material. Want to talk dinosaurs? Forget it, it is not on the
test.
If America had an enemy that got
control of our educational system, they wouldn’t do anything different with
American education since the administrators have made the enterprise as bad as
it can be.
What is maddening to thinking people
is this thought exercise which I have suggested many times. Since there is the
notion of testing the teachers by testing the entire school, let us swap all of
the adults at the five highest scoring elementary schools with the five lowest
scoring elementary schools in Albuquerque.
Two years later the five highest
scoring schools will still be the five highest scoring schools and ditto for
the five lowest scoring schools. This is despite all new teachers,
administrators, cooks, librarians, janitors and crossing guards. The adults lauded
as the best become the worst by being moved to a different school. The whole
testing mania is bogus.
Just as bad is the new push to get every
student to go to college, starting in Kindergarten. We need to give all
students basic education and let them follow their dreams, not ours. Tell me
this: when a smelly sludge comes back flowing out of your biffy what are you
going to do? Call a plumber or a philosopher? The learners need to be in
practical education if that is what sings to them.
In junior high school I took six
semesters with some practical education classes. One semester it was electrical
wiring, one was woodworking, one was tools, one was metal work, one was welding
and one was automotive. The rest of my life I have been relatively handy because
of those three years. And it didn’t change that I got a Ph.D.
Primarily we need to refocus education
onto the students.
Students every year need: first,
engage their curiosity, next give them literate and numerate tools to satisfy
that curiosity. Third, they must enjoy the passage of time in school. It doesn’t
have to be a carnival but if they hate every moment, they will come away with
little. Next, the education must be appropriate to their brain development and
finally, they must retain their dignity at all times.
School years in a testing-centric school
environments are toxic for students. Let’s wake up and focus on the students.
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