'Teach
to the Test'? What Test?
By Colman McCarthy
Saturday, March 18, 2006; A21
From the academic sidelines, where calls to Leave No Child Untested are
routinely sounded by quick-fix school reformers, Jay Mathews joins in
with his Feb. 20 op-ed column, "Let's Teach to the Test." In
well-crafted prose, he reports that "in 23 years of visiting classrooms
I have yet to see any teacher preparing kids for exams in ways that
were not careful, sensible and likely to produce more learning."
On Mathews's visit to my classroom four years ago -- at School Without
Walls, where I have been volunteering since 1982 -- he must not have
noticed that not only was I not preparing my 28 students for tests but
that I regard tests as educational insults. At School Without Walls and
two other high schools where I am a guest teacher -- Wilson High School
in the District and Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in lower
Montgomery County -- I have never given a test. I respect my students
too much to demean them with exercises in fake knowledge.
Tests represent fear-based learning, the opposite of learning based on
desire. Frightened and fretting with pre-test jitters, students stuff
their minds with information they disgorge on exam sheets and sweat out
the results. I know of no meaningful evidence that acing tests has
anything to do with students' character development or whether their
natural instincts for idealism or altruism are nurtured.
I have large amounts of evidence that tests promote the opposite:
character defects. After having two of my high school classes read
Mathews's column, I asked the students: If during a test the
opportunity came to cheat, with no fear of being caught, would you? A
majority of hands went up. A few students dismissed the question as
naive. Not cheat if you could get away with it? Get real. When speaking
at high school assemblies, I ask students how many can raise their
hands and say with total honesty that they never cheated in school. Few
hands go up. If some brave souls do confess to honesty, they are
greeted with jeers or calls of "yeah, right."
Standardized tests measure braininess and memory skills. American
society has plenty of people who were academic whizzes in high school
but were so driven by the lure of a high grade-point average that their
spiritual lives remained stunted. I worry about students who make too
many A's. What parts of their inner lives are they sacrificing to
conform to someone else's notion that doing well in tests means doing
well in life? Is any time left over from mastering theoretical
knowledge for gaining the kind of experiential knowledge found in
community service or volunteering in programs such as Special Olympics
or DC Reads?
Desire-based learning happens when teachers deal in combustibles, when
fires are lit and students burn to explore ideas that have nothing to
do with what testocrats require. Quality teachers who are fire-lighters
often find themselves trapped in schools that have been seduced by the
Advanced Placement fad. Teachers whose students can't hack the AP final
are regarded as failures.
School principals get hammerlocked also. They watch teachers'
performance the way teachers watch students' performance. A hierarchy
results. Most everyone is fearful of someone in power right above.
Students worry about teachers, teachers worry about principals,
principals worry about school boards, school boards worry about
politicians and politicians worry about the voters.
Before riskily breaking ranks with an innovation or two that might
actually eliminate fear in the classroom, a deviator must ask: Will I
be whacked by that power-wielder just above me? Caution reigns.
To compensate for my no-testing policy, I assign tons of homework. The
assignments? Tell someone you love him or her. Do a favor for someone
who won't know you did it. Say a kind word to the workers at the
school: the people who clean the toilets, cook the food, drive the
buses and heat the buildings. And a warning: If you don't do the
homework, you'll fail. You'll fail your better self, you'll fail to
make the world better, you'll fail at being a peacemaker.
For 25 years of testing the waters by not testing, I've been telling my
students not to worry about answering questions. Be braver and bolder:
Question the answers. Which answers? To start, the ones from anyone who
champions classroom get-aheadism based on test scores. Throw off your
chains, students. You have nothing to lose but your backpacks.
The writer, a former Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching
Peace and teaches nonviolence at three high schools and four
universities.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company