Who's in Charge Here?

Who's in charge of Setting Curriculum? This is a sub-heading in Tovani's book, and in the subsequent section she talks about how she talks to teachers, then the principle, then the district coordinator, and finally the state department, asking them all this very question. Every source from the principle upward said that while there are few loose guidelines for curriculum, it is primarily up to the teachers to decide what they want to teach.

This may be true in letter, but not is spirit, and largely it is because of the demon that is standardized testing. Now, this does not apply to my future content since Art is not tested in this way, but the students I have will have to face it in other subjects, my teacher friends of other subjects will have to deal with it, I went through it, and it has greatly affected the teaching lives of both my parents. Consequently, I have very strong feelings about what standardized testing can do to a teacher and student, and the literacy of both, and I am going to rant them! I'll try not to get too preachy.

I am from Texas, where the TAKS test reigns supreme. Passing this test is necessary to move on to the next grade. Let's start with the experience of my parents, both middle school English teachers, with my dad having taught high school for many years as well. The are two portions of the TAKS test for English: writing and reading. A school's test scores will affect funds, discipline, time, and teacher employment for the following year. If a school does not meet standards, or shows a few consecutive years of score decline, people from the Central Office of the district are sent to the school a few times a week to observe classes, view lesson plans, and conference with teachers. It has gotten worse over the years and now TAKS is really everything. So much rides on the results, that while principle cannot dictate exactly what teachers should do, they throw a huge emphasis on the test. All schools in the district have to enact 2 mock-TAKS tests before the actual one, taking up to a whole weeks worth of class each time. Students live in fear that they will fail the test and be held back. At my mother's school, her principle announced the scores of each teacher publicly to the entire faculty and staff during a meeting, shaming those who did not have high enough passing percentages. In Albuquerque this last semester, it was announced that teachers' scores would be published in the newspaper shaming them in front of the entire city if they did not meet the standards.

So what do teachers do?

Using English again, teachers try to keep a solid class curriculum, reading novels and teaching poetry and having class discussions. But I have seen the fear take over both my parents and my own teachers. They don't want the students to fail and risk a year of penalties for the school. They don't want them to fail and have themselves be embarrassed at a meeting or take a pay cut or even get fired. So they put more emphasis on the test. They try to teach the content of the test (which is worthless I might add) but how can you spend adequate time teaching for a test while trying to teach an entire subject? Some teachers end up not teaching the content of the test, and begin just teaching how to pass it. They teach how to search for clues in a question and eliminate answers from the multiple choices. This are good strategies to know anyway, but they should not take the place of actually learning the content! It would be wonderful if the teachers could teach their classes and the test would accurately test that knowledge. But the scope of knowledge tested in the TAKS is very narrow and not sufficiently related to what a child should be learning in an English or any other class.

So bringing it back to literacy, how can a student bring their primary and secondary discourses to the table and expect to shape their own literacy when they face the immense pressure of learning around a test? I'm from El Paso, and I can tell you, the students in my city could not be more different from the students in Midland or Dallas. Yet they all must take the same test that determines their educational future. How can a student branch out in the area of their subject that interests them most when they have such little freedom to do so? How can they build a relationship with a text when they only have a few days to spend with it before they get back to TAKS?

Ok. I guess I've done enough ranting and raving. My opinions of standardized testing are based on my personal experiences, which I recognize can be very different from others. I must say, though, that if teachers are going to be given the freedom to build their own curriculum, as Tovani proved they are in her state, they must be given the means to use it. Teaching is a labor of love and every person in a school can have a much more rewarding time if the literacy itself is cultivated in the classroom, not the restricted, inflexible, standardized testing of it.