T E AC H I N G W I T HOU T T E S T I N G : A S SE S SI N G T H E C OM P L E X I T Y O F C H I L D R E N ’ S L I T E R AC Y LEARNING
TEACHING WITHOUT TESTING A S SE S SI N G T H E C OM P L E X I T Y OF C H I L DR E N ’ S L I T E R AC Y LEARNING
D E N N Y TAY L O R GARN PRESS WOM E N S C HO L A R S SE R I E S B O B B I E KA BU T O, SE N IO R E D I T O R
GARN PRESS N EW YO R K , N Y
BOOK EXCERPT FROM INTRODUCTION BY BOBBIE KABUTO
In his early writings, Walter Benjamin, a writer of literary and cultural analysis, wrote “We are living at a time when it is impossible to open a newspaper without running into the word ‘school,’ at a time when the words ‘coeducation,’ ‘boarding school,’ ‘child,’ and ‘art’ are in the air” (p. 26). While written sometime between 1910 and 1917, this critique certainly has not changed much. Today, newspapers such as the New York Times dedicate entire sections to education and words such as “charter schools” replace “boarding schools” and “Common Core State Standards” replace “art.” Education is a political enterprise, and more recently, an overtly commercial one. This point has been consistently reified through the political endeavor to privatize public education through the evaluation system of both students and teachers. Established through No Child Left Behind in 2001 and exacerbated with Race to the Top in 2009, standardized testing has been deemed the key instrument in determining educational 4
Teaching Without Testing
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accountability. Through federal regulations, assessing students and evaluating teacher effectiveness are about building data systems and adopting standards in the form of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Researchers have painstakingly demonstrated how the movement towards national standards and assessment data systems create databanks of student and teacher evaluation data. These databanks connect to and directly benefit special interest groups and business companies, who profit from the use and development of national standardized tests for K-12 public school students across the nation (Cody, 2014; Spring, 2015; Strauss, 2005). The direct result is the overemphasis on testing, and students in the United States are tested more than students in any other developed nation. Grassroots resistance, however, continues to grow in the form of Opt-Out movements nationwide. Opt-out movements evolved as the implementation and adaption of the CCSS connected to assessment and evaluation systems gained ground across the United States. States began to scramble to find ways not only to develop curriculum around the CCSS, but also to assess students on whether they met the new standards and evaluate teachers on their effectiveness in teaching them. Parents, community organizers, and educational researchers raised concerns over the assessment and evaluation of their children, the time taken away from classroom instruction as children sat for test after test, and the true purpose of the tests. They questioned as to how the tests could help improve instruction for their children when they were evaluated in the spring and the results were provided months later in the fall, when their children had new teachers and new classes. The Opt-Out movement was born from the concerns of these stakeholders, who have direct vested interests in their children’s mental and educational well-being. Opposing
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Teaching Without Testing
the marketization of education and the over testing of children solidified the strength of the movement. Parents, community organizers, and researchers argue that children are not data points, and learning cannot be standardized if we are make education an equitable enterprise. Public education entered a new phase of legislation with the Every Child Succeeds Act, which, in 2016, was signed as a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The act makes small steps in recognizing the overemphasis on testing. The new act requires states that receive federal grant money to audit their assessment system (Sect. 1202). States must report timelines for the release of the assessment data and the amount of time teachers spend on assessment preparation and administration. There are also provisions that allow states to allocate small sub-grants to local schools to hire instructional coaches outside or within the school to support teachers in the development and implementation of classroom-based assessments and developing instruction. The most notable section of the act is Section 1204, which proposes the implementation of “innovative assessments” that include competency-based assessments, instructionally embedded assessments, interim assessments, cumulative assessments, or performance-based assessments. While on the surface this new legislation appears to tackle the increased level of testing in schools, it is still a far cry from amending the woes that testing and commercialization have placed on public education. It is within this context that I introduce Teaching Without Testing: Assessing the Complexity of Children’s Literacy Learning by Denny Taylor. Originally published by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) as a special edition of English Education (Taylor, 1990), and later as a chapter in her book From a Child’s Point of View (Taylor, 1993), Teaching Without Testing
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illustrates how we can assess children in meaningful ways that do not depend on testing. The second book in the Women Scholars Series, Teaching Without Testing is as relevant today as it was in 1993 through the revisiting of Taylor’s Biographic Literacy Profiles Project. Taylor wrote, “We are expected to be accountable, and accountability is built into the system. We use standardized tests to make sure that teachers teach and children learn” (this volume, p. 76). She questions the connection between standardized testing and teacher evaluation by asking, “How does this contingency affect teaching and learning? What pressures does such policy put on teachers? How does it affect opportunities for them to teach and children to learn?” (p. 76). Taylor challenges the scientific assumptions of standardized testing in developing effective instruction to meet the literate lives of all students in the classroom. Arguing that standardized tests promote an “objective reality” and reductionism, Taylor contends that “our interpretations of language (and life) cannot be reduced to a series of competing logical structures or linear stage-theories” (p. 89). The Biographic Literacy Profiles Project highlights how teachers can base their instruction on observations of children and what can happen when “teachers and administrators try to view teaching, learning, and schooling from the perspective of the learner” (p. 21). Biographic literacy profiles provide powerful portraits of children from an advocacy perspective, a perspective oftentimes lost in the standardization of teaching and learning but which needs to be reclaimed by students and their families.
BOOK EXCERPT FROM TEACHING, LEARNING, AND SCHOOLING: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU MAKE A PARADIGM SHIFT?
Complexity Theory and the Reorganization of Schools The Biographic Literacy Profiles Project began with a single child for whom small errors in teaching and testing, followed by repeated retesting had such a catastrophic effect that the school failed – afflicted by what Ed Barnwell refers to as “an institutional inability” to respond to the child’s educational needs (Taylor, 1988). The first biographic profile was written for this child, and although the school that he attended did not take the descriptions of his observable literacy behaviors into consideration or use the information as a basis for his instruction in reading and writing, 8
a group of teachers from another school became interested in the profile and asked if it would be possible for them to write literacy profiles for their first grade children. One school participated in the early, tentative steps, which eventually led to the development and implementation of the research project in six other schools. At the present time 47 teachers and administrators and approximately 1,000 children are participating in the project, and so I can write that although we were unable to change the system for a single child, a single child is changing the system. This is important, for at a time when so many of us are overwhelmed by the mass testing of children, which is mandated through Federal laws and State regulations, this young child has taught us that “individual activity is not doomed to insignificance” (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984). Essentially, the Project is about this child and the many other individual children who have taught us to seriously question the notion of “objective” reality by helping us “make visible” the complexity of symbolic activity in their everyday lives. We have learned that “scientific paradigms can exercise a strong influence on prevailing thought” (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984), and that the dominant societal and political educational ideology is driven by traditional hopes for progress and predictability that might not be in the best interests of children. Based both upon my own research experience and upon my participation in the Project, I would argue that we are irrevocably altering the lives of young children when we impose upon them our traditional aberrant theories and educational practices. Somewhere along the way we have forgotten that “the playground of contingency is immeasurable” (Gould, 1989), and that in the lives of young children we must learn to look at the ordinary and mundane events if we are to see the remarkably rich and subtle complexity of their symbolic behavior. In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks writes, “It is all too easy to 9
take language, one’s own language, for granted – one may need to encounter another language, or rather another mode of language, in order to be astonished, to be pushed to wonder, again” (1989, p. ix). This is the purpose of our study. We are trying to push beyond our own training in the “objective” reality of the present educational system in order to be astonished by the irreducible plurality of functions and forms of language that children use in their everyday lives and, especially for us as teachers, in classroom settings. As we push each other to recognize the wonderful complexity and uniqueness of the symbol-weaving behaviors of children, we are also trying to build the professional expertise and specialized knowledge that will enable us to work with every child in ways that ensure “individual activity is not doomed to insignificance” within the classrooms and schools in which we teach. We have learned that to make such a shift in thinking is a slow process, and that we ourselves must engage in the situationally specific problemsolving activity of learning to teach from the perspective of the child. There are no “step-by-step” or “classroom-tested strategies” (as is suggested by a flyer for a writing program that I have just received in the mail) – just teachers and administrators dedicated to professionalism and with in-depth knowledge of the specific social, symbolic, technical, and material resources, the complexly patterned contingencies, that are constitutive of children’s literacy learning in classroom settings. Within this reflexive framework: 1. Teachers are encouraged to explore their own literacy configurations and to share the ways in which they use print in their everyday lives with the children that they teach. 2. Teachers are supported as they work to recognize their own expertise, and their professional opinions are supported 10
when decisions are being made about the education of the children that they teach. 3. Teachers are provided with opportunities to increase their understanding of the ways in which children reconstruct the functions, uses, and forms of written language. 4. Teachers work together to explore their own literacy configurations, to share their expertise, to help each other develop new understandings, to share viewpoints on specific issues, and to work together on the construction of biographic literacy profiles for the children that they teach. 5. Principals participate with teachers in the development of organizational structures which support the focus upon teaching, learning, and schooling from the perspective of the learner. 6. Principals provide opportunities for teachers to receive ongoing support in their classrooms, at Project meetings, and in summer institutes. 7. Principals provide opportunities for parents to meet with teachers to learn about the project and to explore the way in which their children are learning about literacy as they learn to use literacy. 8. Principals themselves are actively involved in the construction of one or more biographic profiles, so that they have personal understanding of the practical significance of this approach to instructional assessment. It is this collaboration – of teachers and principals – that has made the Project possible. Credit also needs to go to the local school districts for their financial support of the Project for, 11
although the State Department of Education gave their approval, no money has been given to the schools and only limited funds have been made available for two three-day summer institutes and for six seminars to disseminate information about the project throughout the State. Perhaps it may seem inappropriate to comment on this lack of support within the context of the presentation of the theoretical framework and practical significance of the project. But from the perspective of many of the teachers it is important, for they spend their own time on the Project and participants have often stated that much more could be accomplished if monies were made available. We can only hope that eventually as more emphasis is placed upon the reorganization of schools, financial support will be provided at both the state and federal levels. In the meantime, it is important to emphasize that, although State Department support has been limited, Helen Schotanus, the only consultant at the Department with the assignment of early childhood education and reading, has played a major role in the Project. She has organized meetings and supported us in many different ways and in such an unobtrusive fashion that I think we sometimes take her for granted. But it is Helen who works, side-by- side with us, and so often reminds us that “a child’s first experience in school should not be in a testing situation.�
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