Speaking on condition of anonymity, an elementary school principal where 100 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch and 83 percent have limited proficiency in English told me Saturday that what concerns her the most about the PARCC field tests coming in March is not so much the global policy issues they represent but what is happening on the ground.
For example, since she was speaking about a school in a state that has not received many waivers from No Child Left Behind, students in her classrooms will still have to take the state’s NCLB test as well as the PARCC field test. Not only does this count as part of her principal evaluation. Not only will these tests count as part of teacher evaluations for her staff next year. But this testing, effectively, wipes out more than a month of instruction, she said, because tests have to be given in shifts and classes can’t really be much more than babysitting when significant numbers of students aren’t present.
She said teachers often have to spend so much instruction time pulling in material from earlier years in the Common Core, they can’t finish lesson plans for material in students’ current year. That is, if students’ teachers didn’t cover prerequisite material in fourth grade (because it wasn’t part of the state’s learning standards last year), the fifth-grade teachers have to cover it before they can move forward with the fifth-grade material for students this year. That causes instruction to pause and backtrack and could, if too much backtracking is required, cause lesson plans for the current year to go untaught.
But the field test also affects working conditions at the school. For example, lunch schedules have to be adjusted and contract changes negotiated with lunchroom workers, which can be difficult.
I pushed back a little here, suggesting that the new standardized tests from PARCC might be game changers, which could justify a few years of strife on the ground. That is, if the new standardized tests will yield bigger gains for teachers or students that offset smaller losses in the process in terms of kids’ education, my disgust over taking kids out of class on purpose wouldn’t be as severe.
But the work so far coming out of PARCC shows the tests will not be the game changers US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan once promised they would be. In many cases, the sample items released by PARCC are of lower quality than those on existing tests and do not address the full range of many standards in the Common Core (or what those standards should be, if we could modify them).
So, there goes that idea.
Taking a step back, to more global or statewide issues our poor schools face, many times we have heard about putting high-quality teachers in poor schools. Teach for America was founded on that principle, although its actual work has strayed rather far from that ideal. Just last week, during the release of scores on the PISA tests, Angel Gurría, secretary-general of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, said US schools should “find ways to allocate the most talented teachers and school leaders to the most challenging schools and classrooms.” He said that because the PISA showed schools in the US weren’t doing that very effectively.
It seems like a good idea, which many excellent schools around the world are following. How can we do it more effectively in the US?
Some studies, such as this one published by the Mathematica Policy Institute, suggest that good, experienced teachers can be led to poor schools by offering them money just to take the job.
But money won’t be enough for many of these teachers who, let’s face it, didn’t go into teaching because of the money. Rather, we find that conditions on the ground make the difference. One of the top mathematics educators in a certain state once called me on official business from the girls’ bathroom at a high-poverty school. She was simply afraid, hiding out in the girls’ room, because kids were walking around in the hallway during class time with knives. No way we’ll be able to offer her enough money to teach at that school. And we all remember that video of a kid beating up a teacher from a public school in Baltimore City that made its way onto YouTube and The Today Show.
It would seem to be more important to fix the working conditions at these schools so that teachers, who are motivated generally more by intrinsic factors like seeing something click in a child’s eyes than by extrinsic factors like money, will want to teach at these schools. It would seem more important to find ways to engage kids at these schools to a point where education makes a difference in their lives and they want to experience that click in the eye teachers want to see.
Money doesn’t hurt, but if a top state teacher, who was visiting a school to conduct some high-quality professional development, feels she needs to hide out in the girls’ bathroom, it’s a deal breaker. I don’t think we have enough money to entice good teachers to schools in poverty where kids and parents are just so unmotivated that they don’t even care about what teachers want.
