Educational reform desperately needs reform. Reform in education today is in the hands of Federal programs including the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, and the Race to the Top Fund of 2009. Although states can submit “flexibility requests” to receive waivers on some aspects of the NCLB, the reforms that have been affecting American schools have based everything on testing students to “measure” their achievement in math and reading, as well as science and social studies. It has almost morphed into a testing game or competition.

States are now using student test scores to not only evaluate the students, but to determine whether teachers are good or bad, school are successful or failures, and how much funding schools will receive in the future. Don’t you think this is an awful lot of pressure on students? Students as young as 9 years old are held accountable by means of these achievement tests, and indeed many of these students might sit for three-90 minutes sessions in one content area.

Something is wrong with this picture of reform.

In this post I am sharing with you up-to-date articles and research that questions current reform of American education. I hope to shed light on some of the important issues facing parents, students, teachers and principals, the core of our educational system. The articles are collected from previous posts on the Art of Teaching Science blog.

Letters to the President

• Dear Mr. President: Take the Risk and Try and Humanize Teaching and Learning: A Letter I wrote to President Obama, which was sent to the White House. Haven’t received a reply
• Educational Reform: A letter to President Obama: Another letter that I wrote. Still waiting.

Testing, Testing and more Testing

• A Letter from a Teen in 2053 About High-Stakes Testing: A hypothetical story written in the voice of a teenager who tells us about testing in the future.
• The Testing Games: How America’s Youth are being put at Risk: In an analogy to “The Hunger Games, we explore the dehumanization of schooling in the age of testing.
• The Social Emotional Consequences of High-Stakes Testing: How emotional and behavioral disorders have been amplified by the NCLB.
• High-Stakes Testing = Negative Effects on Student Achievement: The collateral effects on students of the high-stakes testing movement.
• Test-Based Reform: What Values are we Adding?: There is more to teaching than simply preparing students for the test. There is attitude and effort, collaboration and teamwork, and the development of character. There is inquiry, problem solving, creativity and innovation.
• NCLB = RTTT = MOT (More of the Same): Will we see a change in educational reform? Will the momentum of the high-stakes, common core standards dominate education for the foreseeable future? Could a paradigm shift emerge from the discontent that is beginning to make itself known?
• Obama Says Stop Teaching to the Test; Teach with Creativity and Passion: For Obama to say that teachers should teach creativity, and stop teaching to the test is a remarkable statement give how the Department of Education is advocating high-stakes tests based on a common set of standards.

Race to the Top

• The Race to the Top: Hold on There!: The Race to the Top Fund will require that the States use achievement tests to measure “growth” of students, and use this kind of data to assess teacher performance.
• Race to the Top Finalists: A Map View: Winners and Losers.
• The Race to the Top: Climbing Mt. PISA: Using scores from tests such as PISA to evaluate and assess science education misleads the public into thinking that science learning has been assessed in the first place.
• Anthony Cody Writes At the Department of Education, Warm Snow Fall Up: he Department of Education is attempting to create a reality distortion field, where we will somehow believe the spin, mistake all these new mandates for “flexibility,” and miss the fact that all these terrible test-scored-driven policies being introduced across the nation are driven by their policies.

Evaluating Teachers

• I Dare You to Measure the “value” I Add: A teacher writes—Tell me how important your data and tests are, and I will tell you how I don’t value your data because it tells me so little about my students yet so much about your educational system.
• Shameful and Degrading Evaluations of Teachers by Politicians: For many governors, and mayors it is fair play to release the names of every teacher in the city, and their Value-added score determined by analyzing student achievement test scores.

Some Ways Out

• Are Reformers Willing to Involve Students in Cultivating a New Culture of Accountability?: But there is a serious omission in the current focus on education by the new administration (and past ones, as well), and that is the consideration of a valid and viable student culture.
• If Science Courses Were Optional, Would Students Sign Up?: Yes, they would. Read about how a teacher in Finland made this work.
• Experiential Science Education: The Real Core of Teaching: The real core of teaching is providing environments, formal or informal, in which students can experience their education—whereby students can inquire into, discuss, become involved in moral and socially relevant issues, and perhaps make real change in themselves, and their community.

What do you think about the role of testing in educational reform?