Chapter 3: Wagner on student testing
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was lucky to go to high school in the late 80s. In the days before No Child Left Behind, my teachers could afford to have us take the time to read complex texts, think about them analytically, and develop writing skills. I don’t remember feeling like my teacher was rushing through the curriculum so we could memorize enough facts to pass a state test. In my public school, we had “honors” classes, not “AP” classes, and we explored the same subject matter as everyone else, only in greater depth. (I only took one AP exam and got a 5 on it anyway.) Sure, there were the occasional “fill in the bubble” standardized tests, but not many. I certainly don’t recall actually preparing for any of them. Sometimes they had material on them we’d never seen before, like diagnostic tests. The only mandatory standardized test I can recall was the SAT. I thought of it as hoop one had to jump through to get into a top college, not as an actual measure of anything important about me.
Wagner is rightly skeptical of high-stakes standardized tests that require students to “recall or recognize fragments and isolated bits of information” (104, citing Conley). Those tests “rarely require students to apply their learning and almost never require students to exhibit proficiency in higher forms of cognition” (Id.) The Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA, described at 115-18) sounds like a refreshing alternative to existing exams that determine college readiness. Nebraska’s STARS test (described at 120-21), which is developed and locally scored by teachers, and is not a multiple choice test, also sounds like a model worth embracing.
Here’s the rub: tests that measure important competencies—the ability to do research, write well, work in teams, solve problems, and think critically --require hand-scoring, so they’re expensive. Factual recall tests are cheap to develop and score (124). They’re also less prone to political controversy. Wagner recognizes all of this. I would add to Wagner’s list of concerns the fact that a few testing company giants have gotten rich off of standardized testing and will not want to give it up. Are we asking our legislators hard questions about the testing companies’ lobbying power, product placement, and textbook sales in connection with these tests? We should be.
Chapter 4: Wagner on teacher education:
Wagner claims, “Very few teacher preparation programs focus on developing the skills needed to be an effective teacher, and they rarely give student teachers meaningful teaching experiences with knowledgeable and effective supervisors.” (145) Wagner goes on, “Instead of having student teachers… memorize the parts of a car, metaphorically speaking, they have to demonstrate that they can actually drive.” (148) Wagner’s assertions do not match my experience at CSUSM all. My clinical practice has given me meaningful teaching experiences, and I have been fortunate to work with marvelous cooperating classroom teachers.
Wagner holds up the NBPTS teacher certification program as exemplary. That program requires teachers to develop “a portfolio in which they demonstrate their ability to plan, teach, and analyze the effectiveness of their lessons” (149). That portfolio is evaluated by a national panel of peers. In addition, NBPTS requires teachers to show how they apply understanding of their content area to students’ learning challenges. I agree that the NBPTS program sounds terrific. However, I think we’re already evaluating, differentiating, and reflecting on our lessons in California with our TPAs and with (some of) our CSUSM coursework. That said, I take Wagner’s point that we still spend a lot of time in our teacher credential program studying education theory, with no clear purpose. I think our program just requires some editing.
Ultimately, I think Wagner is right that we should raise the bar for the initial and continuing education of teachers, raise teacher salaries, create new master teacher/mentor roles, and allot more time during the day to collaborative planning (without students), as they do in Japan. However, I have no confidence that any of these things will happen, because they’re all expensive. The political will to pay for them is simply not there. The demonization of teachers in the media only makes matters worse—people will cry that the government is throwing good money after bad.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was lucky to go to high school in the late 80s. In the days before No Child Left Behind, my teachers could afford to have us take the time to read complex texts, think about them analytically, and develop writing skills. I don’t remember feeling like my teacher was rushing through the curriculum so we could memorize enough facts to pass a state test. In my public school, we had “honors” classes, not “AP” classes, and we explored the same subject matter as everyone else, only in greater depth. (I only took one AP exam and got a 5 on it anyway.) Sure, there were the occasional “fill in the bubble” standardized tests, but not many. I certainly don’t recall actually preparing for any of them. Sometimes they had material on them we’d never seen before, like diagnostic tests. The only mandatory standardized test I can recall was the SAT. I thought of it as hoop one had to jump through to get into a top college, not as an actual measure of anything important about me.
Wagner is rightly skeptical of high-stakes standardized tests that require students to “recall or recognize fragments and isolated bits of information” (104, citing Conley). Those tests “rarely require students to apply their learning and almost never require students to exhibit proficiency in higher forms of cognition” (Id.) The Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA, described at 115-18) sounds like a refreshing alternative to existing exams that determine college readiness. Nebraska’s STARS test (described at 120-21), which is developed and locally scored by teachers, and is not a multiple choice test, also sounds like a model worth embracing.
Here’s the rub: tests that measure important competencies—the ability to do research, write well, work in teams, solve problems, and think critically --require hand-scoring, so they’re expensive. Factual recall tests are cheap to develop and score (124). They’re also less prone to political controversy. Wagner recognizes all of this. I would add to Wagner’s list of concerns the fact that a few testing company giants have gotten rich off of standardized testing and will not want to give it up. Are we asking our legislators hard questions about the testing companies’ lobbying power, product placement, and textbook sales in connection with these tests? We should be.
Chapter 4: Wagner on teacher education:
Wagner claims, “Very few teacher preparation programs focus on developing the skills needed to be an effective teacher, and they rarely give student teachers meaningful teaching experiences with knowledgeable and effective supervisors.” (145) Wagner goes on, “Instead of having student teachers… memorize the parts of a car, metaphorically speaking, they have to demonstrate that they can actually drive.” (148) Wagner’s assertions do not match my experience at CSUSM all. My clinical practice has given me meaningful teaching experiences, and I have been fortunate to work with marvelous cooperating classroom teachers.
Wagner holds up the NBPTS teacher certification program as exemplary. That program requires teachers to develop “a portfolio in which they demonstrate their ability to plan, teach, and analyze the effectiveness of their lessons” (149). That portfolio is evaluated by a national panel of peers. In addition, NBPTS requires teachers to show how they apply understanding of their content area to students’ learning challenges. I agree that the NBPTS program sounds terrific. However, I think we’re already evaluating, differentiating, and reflecting on our lessons in California with our TPAs and with (some of) our CSUSM coursework. That said, I take Wagner’s point that we still spend a lot of time in our teacher credential program studying education theory, with no clear purpose. I think our program just requires some editing.
Ultimately, I think Wagner is right that we should raise the bar for the initial and continuing education of teachers, raise teacher salaries, create new master teacher/mentor roles, and allot more time during the day to collaborative planning (without students), as they do in Japan. However, I have no confidence that any of these things will happen, because they’re all expensive. The political will to pay for them is simply not there. The demonization of teachers in the media only makes matters worse—people will cry that the government is throwing good money after bad.