Saturday, April 14, 2007 5:21 AM
by
jtspencer
the wizard of odd - standardized testing week
Students are swept up into the whirlwind of the AIMS test - a grueling twelve hour marathon where they will be transformed from students into data on pretty graphs in Excel sheets. We're not in Kansas in more. (Honestly, we never were. We live in Phoenix, home of the traffic cone, the brown cloud and a sea of mundane tract housing) It's a Wizard of Oz in reverse - from a vibrant, colorful classroom to a stale, black-and-white, silent prison.
The testing week is an entirely different world, with strange taboos and odd rituals. In many ways, it's like a relgion, (a fundamentalist relgion) with it's own ideology (knoweledge is a science), it's own myths (the notion that every student learns the same material in the same way, that it does not need to be meaningful and that a fill-in-the-bubble test can prove if a student is smart). A system of commands governs the high priests. If I fail to read the catechism correctly, if I deviate at all from the teacher's manual, I lose my job. And when it's all over, students will be judged, labeled and either punished or rewarded.
No one is sure who really governs this magical religion. Who is that wizard? Is it the state department? NCLB? George Bush? Who set up the system and how do we find our way home? I start to think about the testing and The Wizard of Oz. It seems that the test resembles all three of Dorothy's friends.
Tin Man - The test is so mechanical. Despite the research about differentiated instruction, cooperative learning or constructivism, the good people at McGraw Hill have created a test that is tinny - lacking in heart, in meaning, in anything philosophical. It's the idea that students are machines, microprocessors whose job it is to recall information. Yet, no student can compete in rote memorization with a 100 gigabyte hard drive.
The Scarecrow - For all the talk of high standards, the test itself is really low. Instead of asking hard questions, reaching up on Bloom's Taxonomy, forcing students to think well, it is simple rote recall. Besides, as long as it is fill-in-the-bubble, students can always guess. All the test can assess is what students "don't know" rather than what they know.
The Lion - I think the lion is actually me. Though I shake my fist and rail against the system of standardization, I have very little courage to change it. I could have tossed the books in the trash can, started a protest at the capital or encouraged students to draw pictures on their answer bubbles. Instead, I cracked and followed the rules. I feel cheap and dirty, like a man who goes to church but doesn't believe any of it.
Or maybe I'm more like Dorothy (minus the dress, of course) looking for the wizard or the ruby red (originally silver) slippers that can take me back to the normalcy of my classoom, where I can teach according to what is best; where students create documentaries and paint murals, participate in community service, write articles for the website and engage in debates.