"Assessment" Makes My Head Spin...and not in the good way, either

I know I hardly ever talk about my (paid) work here, and yet here I am jumping in two feet first about to ignite a firestorm of controversy (or perhaps just a tempest in a teapot, depending on how many teachers are out there reading). Just so I'm clear from the get-go, here's the thesis of my argument in this post: I think "continuous self-assessment" of one's educational programs is an excellent thing in theory but a typically VILE thing in practice.

The Rant

In theory, "Continuous Self-Assessment" basically means that as teachers (at whatever level from Kindergarten through University), we routinely ask ourselves:

"How did that class go today? How could it have gone better? What are the goals of this class/unit/program/major? How do my colleagues see these goals? Are there ways we could collaborate to make the learning experience better for students?" and so on.

In essence, it means -- and I think all good teachers would agree that this is a good thing -- that we remain purposefully self-conscious about our teaching methods and goals, that we try to be clear to students not just about what we want them to learn but about why, that we design assignments that push them to stretch their thinking, that we hope our classes will expand their worlds, that we think carefully about the skills and needs our students came in with and try to work with what we've got to enable them to learn more. And that we talk to each other a lot about the best ways to try to accomplish this in 75 minute blocks.

In practice, however, "assessment" tends to look like this:

"Have your students take this standardized, fill-in-the-bubble-dots test. If they do poorly on the test, you must suck as a teacher. Reflect on that.

Tell us what you'll do differently. Have them take the test again. If they still do poorly, you must be a really sucky teacher in an even suckier school system.

Know what sucks for you? We're taking away your local/state/federal funding, you stupid crappy teacher, you, and giving it to someone who is better at her job than you. Don't like it? Too bad. We're the Assessing Agency, and we have the power to crush you. Also, even though we aren't teachers, we definitely know what good teaching looks like when we see it -- and we can see from these test scores that it's not happening in your classroom."

Perhaps I over-simplify. (But not much.)

What this assessment process doesn't account for, of course, is that not all classrooms are created equal. Some of them are in wealthy districts where there are plenty of books, nice clean desks, and shiny scrubbed students who ate a good breakfast, will go home to a good dinner, and have parents who will hover over them until their homework is all done. Neatly. Others of them are in districts where teachers have to improvise dry erase boards by covering a wall in saran wrap, where there are two books for every five students (or out-of-date books, or broken books, or no books at all). They have students who have not grown up being told that education is important, or who have heard that message but have not seen it in action because their own parents cannot help them with their homework, or their friends think school is "lame." Some classrooms have 20 well-prepared students to one well-paid teacher. Others have 40 students with at least 20 different skill levels, one underpaid teacher with no assistant, no books, and (understandably) thinning patience.

Yet all these students in all these classrooms have to take the MEEP test in Michigan, which is the standardized test that determines whether Any Child is Being Left Behind. What are the consequences of becoming a "failing school" according to the No Child Left Behind legislation? The best explanation I've ever seen of this adopts a very useful metaphor, and so I reprint it here:

No Child Left Behind -- The Football Version
1. All teams must make the state playoffs and all MUST win the championship. Teams that do not win the championship will be on probation until it they are the champions, and coaches will be held accountable. If after two years they have not won the championship, their footballs and equipment will be taken away UNTIL they do win the championship.

2. All players will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time even if they do not have the same conditions or opportunities to practice on their own. NO exceptions will be made for lack of interest in football, lack of desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities of themselves or their parents. ALL PLAYERS WILL PLAY FOOTBALL AT A PROFICIENT LEVEL!

3. Talented players will be asked to work out on their own, without instruction. This is because the coaches will be using all their instructional time with the athletes who aren't interested in football, have limited athletic ability, or whose parents don't like football.

4. Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th, and 11th games. It will create a New Age of Sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimum goals. If no team gets ahead, then no team gets left behind. If fans do not like this new law, they are encouraged to vote for vouchers, and support private teams that can screen out the non-athletes and prevent their players from having to play with bad football players.

Argue about the policy how you will, the above is certainly how most teachers feel it seems to work.

At the university level, assessment is coming too. It's not yet as dire as No Child Left Out of Football, but it's pretty bad. It results, for many schools, in contradictory policies and aims like these:

(1) We will be an open university and admit nearly everyone who applies, on the notion that all students deserve to be given a chance, and that many students who were never given the tools to succeed in elementary and secondary schools might excel once they are in an environment that nurtures them.

(2) This, of course, means that there will be students periodically who don't really belong in college, who do not have the skills, or the aptitude, or the background to excel in college, who will be in your classrooms. It is your job to help them succeed. If they do not succeed, you must be a bad teacher. If you are a bad teacher (as reflected by the fact that some of your graduates, for example, cannot pass the state exam that qualifies them to become elementary school teachers themselves), then you may lose your accreditation as an instution that certifies teachers.

Do you see the conundrum? At the acceptance end of the spectrum, we are being asked to be a university that welcomes almost everyone, regardless of skills, on the hopes of potential. At the graduation end of the spectrum, we are being asked to be an elite institution that only graduates superior students.

You can't really have it both ways.

Now, a university can make choices. If you're Harvard, you're elite in your acceptances, and hence your graduates pass tests with flying colors because you've preselected students who can succeed at such tests. If you're a small, regional college, you're welcoming in your acceptances, hoping your personal approach to teaching will help students who otherwise might never have a chance -- and many of them DO succeed because someone finally believed in them. But a few fail. They must. And that must be okay.

Unfortunately, it's not okay in the parlance of assessment where the assessment of teacher competence is the success of students on a standardized test.

Now imagine if you are a teacher in an elementary or secondary school, a public school that doesn't get to pick and choose students. You have to take everyone. It's the law. And despite the fact that they don't all have equal interests, aptitudes, strengths, you are supposed to MAKE them all fit into these tidy little bubble dot holes as if they are all so many nice little oval pegs, all just the same.

It's probably obvious by now that I'm in the middle of our accreditation assessment. What the process has taught me is that it is undeniably a good thing for us to talk to each other not just about what we do but about why. It is excellent to reevaluate our programs and courses, to modify not just our individual classroom moments but our overall educational goals as a literature faculty on the basis of many factors. However, I don't think one of those factors should be an Assessment Agency's sometimes misguided sense of what our "outcomes" should be. And I also don't think it's easy to quantify in numbers and charts whether teaching is successful.

And I really don't think that whether students pass a certain exam, or get certain grades, is a particularly good measure of how good a teacher is. I have known astonishingly lazy teachers who give easy multiple-choice tests and whose students nearly all end up with As, and I've known other teachers who work exceedingly hard to teach their students the difficult skills (and even more difficult arts) to being a good reader and writer, whose class average will be something like a low B. I would argue that the second teacher, the one whose students' grades are actually LOWER, is the one doing the better job by her students. But the Rules of Assessment would say otherwise.

Don't get me wrong here. I'm not saying there are no bad teachers in the US system. I'm not saying that teachers should not be held accountable in any way for accomplishing specific teaching goals and helping their students reach certain milestones.

But I am saying that just because I can boil my students' learning down to a score of 24.5 on elements 4.3.2 and 5.4.7 and 3.2.6 on the Assessment Rubric doesn't mean I'm a good teacher. It just means I've figured out how to play the assessment game.

And for my money, our educational system will only really be effective when we find ways to stop asking teachers to spend so much time figuring out how to play the assessment game and let them get down to the real business of teaching to their students' needs.