Teachers, Testing, and the Governor:
Colorado’s education reforms will drive out the very teachers we want to keepby
Dan Liston
Center for Education Research, Analysis, and Innovation
School of Education
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
PO Box 413
Milwaukee WI 53201
414-229-2716
June 6, 2000
CERAI-00-13
Teachers, Testing, and the Governor:Colorado’s education reforms will drive out the very teachers we want tokeep
By Dan Liston
The teachers who taught methe most loved their subjects and cared for their students. Mr. Keener, mydemanding high school social studies teacher, showed us how history illuminatedour worlds. He made us sit up straight in class and take notes; we understoodthese demands as marks of his respect for us.
Mr. Fleenor, my geometryteacher, lured us into the world of geometry by helping us to think logically,clearly, and elegantly. When we entered his room we knew we would work at ittogether. Miss Dutro, my biology teacher, could look at a roadside weed andshow us its ecological niche. She turned weeds into fascinating objects and shealso believed we were fascinating.
When these three tested ourhigh school accumulated wisdom, they were assessing what we had tried to learnin their classrooms.
In the Colorado of GovernorBill Owens, my test scores would have assessed my teachers. As a student Iwouldn’t want my standardized test scores to be the measure against whichmy teachers would be evaluated -- unless, of course, I didn’t like myteachers. To evaluate teachers properly we need multiple measures thatrecognize the complexity of teaching. To rely on test scores alone is narrowand simplistic
Schools house children andadolescents for six to eight hours a day. While the school is not a home, itsteachers can influence students in remarkable ways. Good elementary teachersteach a love of learning, create classrooms that are caring and respectful, andenable kids to master basic skills. Good secondary teachers convey and createin their students a love of their subject matter, model decent and caringbehavior, and create classrooms where kids are hungry to learn. Teaching iswork, it is a profession, and for many it is a vocation -- a calling. TheGovernor’s testing calculus narrows what is good and worthwhile inteaching to students’ standardized test scores.
If the work of teaching ismeasured so narrowly, who would choose it as a profession? Who would want towork in a setting as complicated and demanding as a school only to be judged onsuch narrow measures? Who will want to share their passion for knowledge andunderstanding or create classrooms that are respectful and caring if the sum oftheir efforts is going to be reduced to standardized test measures? Goodveteran teachers remain in schools, not because of prestige or money, but forthe love it. Teaching is their calling. Reduce teaching to students’ testscores and we will destroy any attraction that is left in the honorable andquite cumbersome endeavor of teaching. If we destroy the passion that fuelsgood teaching, who will want to do it?
There are other ways toevaluate teachers; standards and procedures that don’t solely rely onstudents’ test scores. Some states have developed teacher portfolios as ameasure of a teachers’ abilities. A variety of professionally developedteacher assessment tools already exist. Principals, in conjunction withteachers and the larger community, could devise multiple measures forteachers’ effectiveness.
In a fair world we wouldrecognize teachers’ complex roles. In a decent world a teacher’spassion for knowledge and understanding along with their attempts at creatingrespectful and caring classrooms would be recognized. In a just world teacherswould be held accountable for these larger efforts.
But we don’t live ina fair, decent, or just world. We live in a world that cares more forinformation bits and corporate markets than it does for an education thatpromotes knowledge, understanding, respect, and community. We live in a worldwhere in the spring of 1999 Colorado’s Governor supported legislationthat would have allowed guns in schools and the next week fell silent, inmourning. We live in Colorado, a state that has been 49th in state funding topublic education, seventh in household income levels, and in which,nonetheless, our state officials bemoan the predictable results of such meagerfunding.
Problems exist inColorado’s schools, but they are not the problems that our Governorpoints to. In Colorado many of our rural and urban schools are inadequatelyfunded. Teachers are demeaned and belittled as a whining group of selfinterested ‘educrats’. Students are viewed as outcomes, products tobe standardized in the factories of schooling. Solutions exist. Adequatefunding across school districts, increased teachers’ pay that recognizesthe work of teaching, and an understanding of schools as places of learning,not sites of production, would help. Unfortunately the Governor’s solutions,along with those of the state’s education commissioner, William Moloney,will only compound the very real and complex problems surrounding publiceducation.
In the world of Gov. Owensand Commissioner Moloney, the matter is plain and simple: teachers teach kids,and the state should test kids and hold teachers accountable for studentoutcomes. We are being duped. We are being sold a faulty bill of goods thatwill harm our children. Standardized schools create thin and insipid places oflearning. Talented teachers will leave. Students will suffer.
The Governor was wrong whenhe supported legislation that would have allowed guns in schools. Fortunatelyhe realizes that was a mistake. But now he has legislated a harmful educationalsolution and he is wrong again. The citizens of Colorado do not need anothercatastrophe to wake them up to this fact, but we may need a little education.
This mean-spirited view ofschool reform through testing bodes ill for the future of schooling inColorado. Now that his agenda has won, more children will be lost. We will beleft with schools that drill and test students; as a result their learning willbe lifeless.
I doubt if Mr. Keener, Mr.Fleenor, and Miss Dutro would want to teach in such settings. That’s toobad, because they taught us well.
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