Members' Studio
In this section, we'd like to feature members' literary and
art contributions related to education and/or unionism. If you have something to contribute,
let our webster
know. Give your name, job title, work location, home phone and the type of material you have.
The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising Scores, Ruining the Schools Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights Reviewed by Tom Gallagher Firmly embedded in the mix of prescriptions for curing the
crisis widely presumed to exist in America's educational system
are standardized tests. The tests themselves are not offered
as a solution; they actually enjoy a status above that of any
particular solution. We may debate the various educational
proposals, but the need for testing is generally considered
beyond debate. How else can we know the extent of the problem
and the success or failure of the remedies unless we use a
common standard?
On the strength of this argument, or more accurately, this assumption,
standardized testing increasingly determines not just the fate
of individual students but the funding of entire schools. But with
the proliferation of tests has also come a growing doubt about their
appropriateness. The Case Against Standardized Testing is a handbook
for parents, teachers and students who have felt there was something
wrong with the trend, but may not have known exactly what -- or
what to do about it if they did know.
Inevitable tendency to teach to the test Kohn tells of a Cambridge, Massachusetts middle
school teacher who used to have her students select an activity
that interested them, learn everything they could about it, and
report on it to the class -- an exercise that afforded each student
the possibility of shining while also providing them an opportunity to
figure out how -- and why -- to learn for themselves. But now she has
felt compelled to scrap these research projects in the face of the greater
obligation to cover what's "going to be on the test."
Of course, some tests are worse than others. On the one end we have
mathematics which many may consider a reasonable subject for a mathematical
assessment, and at the other end, we have writing. Kohn notes that
"It's easier to get agreement on whether a semicolon has been used
correctly than on whether an essay represents clear thinking." And yet
each year many thousands of test-takers will write essays which "in many
states are not evaluated by educators; they are shipped off to a company
in North Carolina where low-paid temp workers spend no more than two or
three minutes reading each one."
Tests reflect socio-economic background And what about the children of families with earnings that are but
small multiples of $10,000? And, in particular, what about the children
of black America, where low test scores faithfully mirror low economic status?
Although Moses never gained the fame of some others like Stokely
Carmichael or Julian Bond (in fact, he's often confused with the highway-building
Robert Moses of Robert Caro's The Powerbroker), many people will tell you that
in the Southern voter-registration efforts of the early 1960s,it was Moses who
was the man. Certainly, he walked the walk: In 1963, he "was targeted in
a machine-gun ambush outside of Greenwood. Instead of hitting me,
one of the thirteen bullets that penetrated our car smashed
into the neck of the Tougaloo student Jimmy Travis who was driving and
lodged half an inch from his spine."
Algebra Project: math literacy is crucial for economic success So, forty years later, Moses is back in Mississippi
teaching math. Why teach math? Partially because he thinks that math
literacy is crucial for economic success in the future, and partially
to take advantage of "the national consensus in favor of educating all
children well" that he contrasts with "the absence of such
a consensus on health care."
Of course, while almost all may agree on the need for educational improvement,
far fewer are in touch with the current realities of the problem. Charles
Cobb worked with Moses in the 60s. It was his car that "freedom riders"
Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman drove on the night they were murdered. He's
been around. And yet he confesses in his introduction to Radical
Equations that when Moses first engaged him in the Project, "I
had not been involved with public schools for years and while
visiting them in that city [Chicago] it seemed as if I had traveled
to another world," as he watched a mother attack a teacher
in a hallway, and talked to a kid as "another kid walked up
behind him and hit him in the head with a brick or something."
As Moses says, "what young people are up against today is less
clear than the raw racism of segregation laws and the Ku Klux Klan" --
but not less difficult. In the end it is probably less important whether
the Algebra Project itself provides the solution Moses seeks than that
it continues the struggle of the 60s on new terrain, and alerts others
to just what that terrain is.
Tom Gallagher is a substitute teacher with SFUSD and an At-Large Substitute Representative for UESF.
By Alfie Kohn
Heinemann, 2000, $10
By Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb, Jr.
Beacon Press, 2001, $21
From the September 26, 2001 East Bay Express
The first thing that Alfie Kohn -- a former
teacher who has written widely on the subject -- objects
to is the inevitable tendency to "teach to the test." Some
standardized exams, like the Scholastic Aptitude Tests, have
been around so long as to seem just a natural part of academic life.
(While I was writing this review, a high school English classroom in
which I substitute taught contained the videotape, Six Steps
to SAT Success, and the book, Test-Taking Strategies: Reading,
Language and Vocabulary for California High School Students.) But as standardized testing has insinuated itself more broadly,
people have started to pay more attention to its educational impact.
One thing Kohn allows that standardized tests actually will do well is
to reflect the economic backgrounds of the groups that take them:
"Break down the test takers by income, measured in $10,000 increments,
and without exception the scores rise with each jump in parents' earnings."
Subsequently Moses taught in Africa, where he went in part due to his
refusal to fight in Vietnam, and came back to the study of mathematics. While
earning his Ph.D. in math from Harvard, he grappled with teaching math to his
own daughter. His prime influences in developing the Algebra Project that
has now spread to twenty-five cities were the philosopher of mathematics,
Willard Van Orman Quine and a fourteen year old struggling math student
named Ari (a relationship he goes into in the book's appendix.) Few
people can encompass that range of study, but then Moses didn't win
a MacArthur "genius grant" for nothing. Plus, he has always agreed
with what Ella Baker, one of his civil rights movement heroines, used
to say, "Cast down your bucket where you are."
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