I don't know about you guys, but in reading the article Public School Reform: The Mismeasure of Education, I have to say that many of my buttons were pushed. Whenever discussions about the accountability of schools, or No Child Left Behind comes up, I tend to get very angry and very passionate about my opinions on this subject.

Although the No Child Left Behind Act is nation-wide, North Carolina has its own mandates as shown in the article: incentives for teachers and schools who achieve a certain standard, teachers are required to take a knowledge test if their students do poorly, a teacher's tenure is often determined by their test scores, and recently, Principals can often be affected by poor scores and can be suspended or removed from their position.

There are several things to say about this subject. First of all, I do agree that schools should be held to some level of accountability. After all, the public school is funded by the government, so the government should be able to hold the school accountable for what they're doing. However, the way in which schools are currently being held accountable is faulty, and is a mismeasure of how students and teachers are really doing. For example, if a student does not do as well on his EOG because he is a poor test taker, but learns life lessons and skills that will help him in, per say, the future job market, or in writing an admissions essay that would get him into a four-year college, is he then considered a failure? Or what about children who are very bright and test well, and are eager to learn, but cannot because their teachers are forced to teach to a test so that they can keep their job and their pay? Where is the pleasure of learning or the quest for personal meaning? Shapiro says, "Real education encourages students in the search for the unpredictable or the unexpected"(28 ). They cannot search for that if they are being forced to learn things so that they can pass a test. Shapiro also says, "There is here, of course, the vulgar notion that good teaching is reducible to higher scores on the test- surely the most limited of ways to think about the nature and purpose of teaching. There is, too, the pressure to convert the breadth and complexity of children's development to the crude simplicity of a numerical score- a trivializing and insensitive travesty apparent to most teachers who understand just how little is captured by this about human intelligence, creativity, or sociability" (29). That poses another question, where is creativity or sociability in these tests? There is more to education than just facts and numerical scores.

Another interesting point in this article, was the fact that these "standardized" tests are not really unbiased at all. As it turns out, schools are deeply involved in the "cultural and material inequities of class, race, gender and region; those who do well in school and those who do badly are much better explained by te social circumstance within which our kids grow up, rather than whether their teachers are especially talented or even hard-working" (30). As a result of this, teachers are forced to seek jobs in more upscale neighborhoods and districts because this is the best way for teachers to avoid consequences for test scores. So what about those schools with lower scores, what would make a teacher want to go there, even though they might be desperately needed, if there is a chance of dismissal due to test scores?

I say all of that to say this, why and how? Why are we allowing this to continue? And, since by the time we get into our own classrooms we will probably be under some of the same conditions, how? How will we try to create daring and challenging environments for our students, yet also infuse in them the facts and knowledge they need to do well on their test? How will we break away from the "daily grind" of teaching to a test, yet still instill what's needed to do well on those tests? What will we do?

Anna,

Your post is an important one, and I hope your classmates will think about it and give you a response.

One thing I find rather surprising is that the candidates of both political parties appear to favor NCLB, with the one exception being that Obama favors more financial support for schools. But is this enough change in the status quo? At the moment, I don't think so.