If there’s a school-aged child in your life, you’re no doubt aware it’s TAKS season. (TAKS: Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills – Texas’ brand of school standardized testing.) I’ll drag out the biggest soapbox I can find. Feel free to join me. And know my rant is directed beyond the local level; those toiling in our communities are hamstrung while a select out-of-touch few sit from on high and tax the minds of our greatest commodity.
There are stirrings of new educational developments here in Texas. A group of school superintendents and administrators interested in education reform comprise what is now called the Public Education Visioning Institute. They’ve been meeting for a few years and last summer released a 48-page work-in-progress report entitled “Creating a New Vision for Public Education in Texas”. It’s an interesting read, and the ideas and concepts explored are quietly making their way to people willing, able, and ready to start a revolution.
Sociologists, psychologists, and educators are converging on a theory that the way the human brain processes information is changing due to young children’s exposure to technology in their everyday lives – long before they sit behind a desk in a classroom. Instead of working to change the way education is delivered, much time and money has been spent making sure each individual is accountable for one-size-must-fit-all standards. There’s a disconnect, and it’s easily apparent to any layperson who visits a classroom. Creative teachers do what they can, but they’re fighting a losing battle against a massive push to sameness.
Keith Sockwell, CEO of the education consulting firm Cambridge Strategic Services says, “When we look at our public schools today, I’d say they’re doing a dadgum good job of preparing our kids for the twentieth and nineteenth century.” How unfair is that to a person charged with getting us through the twenty-first century?
Educators at local levels and school boards alike blame the loss of local control and autonomy in their respective schools, while state and federal agencies want accountability in exchange for tax dollars sent. Our children and our future hang in the middle. The new vision report by Texas educators states that the current accountability system has indeed narrowed curriculum. It was refreshing to read such an admission. I think we’ve all heard it categorically denied.
I’ve sat through many parent nights where standardized testing was an instructed-from-above talking point. There’s always at least one renegade parent making his displeasure over “teaching to the test” known. The rote response is always the same. “We can’t really teach to the test because we don’t know exactly what the state will include each year.”
While it may be true that the content of the new test each year is somewhat of a surprise, those of us with school-aged children know all too well that fact doesn’t stop the how-to-TAKE-the-test instruction. The code word for that: strategies. And “strategies” leave no room for any thought process other than the one the child is told to have.
Forget having strength in a particular subject area and being able to reason your way through to the correct answer. Not allowed. And weakness? That child will need extra practice circling, underlining, bracketing, “erasing” irrelevant information and finally solving the problem. On the test, all that matters is getting the correct answer . . . not good if you’re a nine-year old who gets too bogged down in the “process” of test taking to ever reach that answer.
With educators who know the system leading the charge, maybe the time is right for a revolution of sorts. Parents, teachers, and administrators whose lives are intertwined with children daily know this isn’t working. The world’s problems won’t be solved with homogenous thinkers armed with little more than No. 2 pencils and scan tron answer forms. Communities need to get behind this group and with one loud voice state, “No more TAKSation without representation!”
© 2009 Natalie Whatley