Saturday, March 13, 1999
Standardized tests rob kids of best teaching
BY KRISTA RAMSEY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
It is the middle of March. If you are the parent of a child in an Ohio school, don't expect megaprojects this time of year. Don't bother checking the backpack for lovely poems with illustrations. The All About Me unit is long past, and dinosaur studies are sadly extinct.
This is the season — give or take a week, depending on your school district — of Ohio Proficiency Testing.
Begun in 1990, the tests were designed to make the state's schools and teachers more accountable. Their success is open to question, but this much is certain: They have made everything more predictable.
Fourth-graders learn to read weather maps. Sixth-graders change fractions to decimals. What the tests measure is, in no small part, what teachers must teach.
Is there still room for teacher discretion? Certainly some. But with every twist of the test — which has grown from ninth grade to 12th grade to sixth grade to fourth grade and now covers five subject areas — classroom autonomy has given way to statewide standardization.
It does protect students from teachers who plan lessons around what is comfortable for them, not what is most beneficial for the student. It ensures that all students will cover the same core of information and skills — that Mrs. Smith's second-graders will not always trail everyone else in math, for example.
But that progress comes at a cost. It may cheat our children of the spontaneous experiences — the “teachable moment” — when the fallen bird's nest is brought in, and everyone huddles around for a lesson (maybe even a long one) on instinct and construction.
It can also put an end to a practice that somehow looks criminal to state legislators, but really works quite beautifully with kids: The teacher who does go off on a flight of fancy to teach something simply because she adores it.
Those experiences count for something, too. Once in a while, they might even change a child's life.
Where has wonder gone?
Experts on learning tell us that the spontaneous, the odd, the different are the very things children are most likely to remember.
They also tell us that children best respond to that which is presented with enthusiasm and passion.
So, while we are grateful that the state of Ohio is zealously keeping everybody on track, we want to know that there are still places in the school day where children's minds and imaginations can wander. And wonder.
Perhaps we could find a bigger place in our hearts for standardized curricula if so much else in our children's lives wasn't being standardized as well. We've replaced delicious traditions such as trick-
or-treating with “community events,” and taken all the fun out of creative work such as Valentines with store-bought greetings that kids sign like robots. Our kids' after-school hours are block schedules of lessons and play dates. Plus, of course, time for the commute.
Even the most precious rituals are disappearing. Back-to-school shopping has been reduced to checking items off a standardized list. Five blue folders. One pair of Fiskar scissors. Whatever happened to handling the pencils? Agonizing over the choice of notebooks? Smelling the inside of the satchel and feeling that back-to-school excitement work in our gut?
Don't blunt the best
Most of us support accountability. We just want to make sure that standardized testing and standardized curricula don't end up equalling standardized children.
We concede it. There are schools that need being fixed, kids who need help and teachers who need guidelines.
But there are also curious kids, conscientious schools and marvelous teachers.
And a great many of us are grateful for them every day.
Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm St., Cincinnati 45202.
Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at the Enquirer, 312 Elm St. Cincinnati 45202.
RAMSEY ARCHIVE
