A Tale of Two Schools – Differing Responses Standardized Testing

This is a tale of two schools. Actually, it is a tale two events at one school, five years apart, but they might as well be at two different schools based on the response of the faculty to an external stimulus.

The external stimulus in this case is standardized testing and this is the story of how these two schools responded.

There are two theses in this article: One, that as demonstrated by School Two in this story, standardized testing is not the insidious evil it is often made out to be; and two, as demonstrated by School One in this story, the real problem with standardized testing may be the negative consequences of the response of the system to an external stimulus.

The generalizable observation here is that when implementing any action on a system, one needs to be aware of the possibility for, and potential negative impacts of the countering behaviors of that system.

School One

When my oldest daughter was in grade school, the State of Washington, as part of the No Child Left Behind Act, had implemented what was know as the Washington State Assessment of Learning, commonly referred to as the WASL and pronounced “was-el.” The first of these tests was given near the end of the fourth grade.

One day my daughter brought home a notice inviting parents to a WASL information night. I liked to stay involved and informed, so I dutifully attended the meeting.

The “information” that was presented at that meeting was a plan to stop the regular fourth-grade curriculum about three weeks before the WASL was administered, and spend those three weeks reviewing for the test. The teachers then went on to note how disruptive this was, and to describe just how bad “teaching to the test” was.

School Two

Fast-forward five years. My youngest daughter is now in fourth grade at the same school, well actually a school of the same name, in a new building on the same plot of land. One day a flier came home about a WASL parent information night, and just as I did with my oldest daughter, I dutifully attended the meeting. The experience however, was something completely different from that meeting five years before.

In this parent information meeting, the principal introduced the speakers, one teacher from each grade, kindergarten through fifth grade. The kindergarten teacher talked about how our children were being introduced to basic numbers theory, letter theory and introductory reading skills among other things, and described how that fed into the first-grade curriculum. The first-grade teacher talked about how the first-grade curriculum prepared students for the second-grade curriculum. The second and third-grade teachers did the same thing.

When the fourth-grade teacher finally got up to speak, one of the parents blurted out a question, “Yeah, but what about the WASL?”

The fourth-grade teacher answered with: “As parents, all you really need to worry about in regards to the WASL is that your child has had a good night sleep the night before testing, and a decent breakfast the day of, so they will be fresh and ready.” The parent went on to ask about the risk of their child failing the test. The teacher responded: “You really don’t have anything to worry about. If your student is at risk of failing, you will have known about it by the end of second grade because we will be working with you to address any failure risks.”

There was no mention of cramming, no curriculum disruption, no concern about teaching to the test.

Analysis

The modern school reform movement began in the early 1950’s, largely a response to a perceived lag in technical competency as compared to the advances of the Soviet Union during the cold war. The reform movement continues to be fueled today by an economy which is driven by advances in technology.

To staff the jobs in this economy requires greater knowledge and skills than in the past, and importantly from the perspective of employers, a common understanding, a standard, for what it means to be a high school graduate.

Today’s classrooms however, are still largely running on a craft-based model. The classroom is usually an isolated entity, the domain of the presiding teacher who, even if they have honed their skill to a high level of craftsmanship, still imparts a unique learning experience on their students.

More than 50 years after the beginning of the school reform movement, with little movement shown to address this gap, the well-meaning bureaucrats in Washington DC decided to force the issue by insisting on metrics, typically in the form of testing, to evaluate success in meeting these minimum standards, and then tying federal funding to the results. What they didn’t count on was the unintended negative response from the education system.

The furor over standardized testing is, I think, the result of a cultural collision between a modern economy’s need for
minimum standards for knowledge and skill, and a tradition of education as individualized craft.

As illustrated by school number one above, those negative responses often take the form of cram sessions and disrupted curriculum. Schools often drop valuable, though non-core curriculum material like art and music. In an effort to force the issue of curriculum standards, administrators may require teachers to develop detailed lesson plans, which take away from actual content important to learning.

But as illustrated by school two here, these negative, often damaging responses need not be the given outcome. The intention of standardized testing really has little to do with testing, rather it is merely a quality assurance check on the capability of the larger system to deliver results. If that system is working effectively, then the test becomes a nonissue.

So how do you get from being a school as described here in School One, to being a School Two?

After the parent information night at my oldest daughter’s school, I requested a meeting with the principle, because I viewed the response of the teachers as a damaging influence on my daughter. The principal agreed with me, but describe how he actually had limited influence over his faculty. He invited me in to describe my perspective, as a parent, at his next faculty meeting.

At the faculty meeting, I gave a 15-minute Powerpoint talk, starting with the origins the school reform movement, how it began with the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, how that related to my perspective as a parent in an engineering discipline with a Demming quality assurance perspective.

When I concluded, there were several moments of silence, then the teacher who had been my daughter’s first-grade teacher, for whom I have nothing but high regard, spoke up. “But I don’t even know what’s on the 4th-grade WASL,” she said.

“And that is precisely the problem,” I said. “How can you be successful in first grade if you don’t know how, what you are teaching them now, contributes to what they are expected to know in second, or third, or fourth grade?”

I like to think that meeting with the faculty of my oldest daughter’s school planted the seed which germinated into a whole new way of thinking about education which resulted in school two. But in truth, probably no one ever remembered my little talk of Sputnik those many years ago.

Rather, my youngest daughter’s school, School Number Two here, likely came about as a result of a new school building, which enabled the upending of entrenched cultural habits, which enabled more collaboration, which resulted in more emphasis on curriculum articulation, which resulted in no longer needing to be intimidated by a standardized test.

School two here demonstrates that the test isn’t the problem. The problem is how a system may negatively respond to an external stimulus in ways in which not only diminish the value of the stimulus in the first place, but may actually result in more damage than the problem the stimulus was intended to fix.

Remember that next time you plan on implementing a change.