Finding My Place (and Myself) in a Test-Obsessed School

Front-Matter Addendum: a colleague of mine has suggested that, however unlikely it may be, it's possible that someone who would take offense to this post would come upon it and that I could avoid an unlikely google search by omitting the actual name of the school/district in which I teach. Given that my last name is no where on this blog and run-of-the-mill google searches do not bring it up, I don't really see any reason to be additionally cautious.  However, I have changed the name of the school and district to something very silly, which I think improves the piece dramatically.  Please enjoy.

I just finished my 29th teaching day at my new job.  Now 16% of the way through the school year (a figure that raises the simultaneous questions of "already that far in?" and "only that far in?"), I am starting to get a real read on the deal with Plumberville High.  I suspect it will take me many more months to have a true understanding of the climate, culture, and actual operations from top to bottom, but at least I can say that I am no longer completely ignorant and in the dark.  If this were the Allegory of the Cave, I would be like a third of the way out of the cave, at least aware that there was a world beyond it.

Plumberville High School (and, either as a cause or a result, the entire district) is obsessed with testing.  Although I don't think this is a positive characterization, I doubt that even the administrators there would wholly disagree with me.  PHS spends an inordinate amount of time and energy (and therefore money) on preparing students for tests.  The biggest and most critical of these is the MCAS, or Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System.  Although it is slated to be replaced by the hopefully-but-probably-not-that-much-better PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) test, the MCAS is still the be-all and end-all for 9th and 10th grade students at PHS.  English 1 and 2 courses could easily be called MCAS Preparation 1 and 2, and that would not be entirely inaccurate.  This is not to say that these classes have no value outside of the tests, or that the teachers of these classes are not doing wonderful jobs - neither of those are true - but it is apparent from a single curriculum development meeting or even a glimpse at the unit and lesson plans of these courses that the ultimate goal is for all students to score Proficient or Advanced on the MCAS.

Fortunately for those of us teaching 11th or 12th grade, this pressure is non-existent because the 10th grade MCAS test is the final one for both ELA and Math.  There is, however, now an increased focus on raising student performance on the SATs, typically taken late in junior or early in senior year.  Although the time and attention devoted to preparation for this test (which, by the way, was originally called the Scholastic Aptitude Test but now the letters stand for...get this...nothing) is far less than that which is devoted to the MCAS, at least in the English Department, there has still been a push from administration to get students prepared for this college entrance exam.

The problem with the angle the school is taking, which is the problem with all teach-to-the-test curricula, is that the ultimate goal is never to better students' learning, impart unto them valuable skills which they can use in a variety of career paths or educational settings, or even get them ready for college (a goal which, in itself, is fairly short-sighted and should be addressed at an appropriate scale).  The goal is to raise test scores.  Full stop.  Period.  The end.  If students' learning is increased and they build skills, that's great, but those outcomes are not necessary for the school's plans to be considered successful.  If students scored Super-Mega-Opposite-of-Dummy Advanced on the MCAS and all subsequent standardized tests, yet were unable to discuss a book in a thoughtful way or count correct change at a cashiering job, the teachers themselves would likely be rather concerned, but the administration at large would consider this a speed bump, not a major problem.

To be fair, I did know to some extent what I was getting into at Plumberville High.  Any public school in Massachusetts with such a diverse population and an iffy academic record is going to be focused on test preparation because of a number of factors, Race to the Top/No Child Left Behind not being the least of those.  I became aware of just how key MCAS was at PHS when I concluded by initial job interview with a written task.  My assignment was to examine the assessment data from a theoretical class, read through and score an open response writing sample (one of the two types of writing done on the MCAS), and then design a lesson to supplement the class' learning based on what I thought they needed help with.  The whole thing stunk of MCAS prep, and there was no effort on the part of the interviewer to disguise this fact.  I completed the task, apparently to the satisfaction of the department head, and after another interview I was offered the position.

After I was officially hired and began attending professional development sessions, my first impressions were only confirmed, especially after I sat in a classroom for two hours after school one day and essentially observed the 9th and 10th grade teachers making lesson plans directed at improving students' performances on the open response section of the MCAS.  At least, I'm pretty sure that's what was happening; it was hard to keep my attention on the conversation at hand given that it a) didn't apply to my practice and b) was yet another conversation about how better to prepare students for assessments.  The broken record of "let's raise those scores!" was beginning to wear on me.

The problem - as I see it - is that Plumberville's plan is working.  Their MCAS scores have gone up by huge leaps and bounds the last couple of years.  The goal is being met, and even exceeded in some cases.  The plan, approaching areas of the test with the greatest potential for improvement, is actually a very good method if the only thing you care about is raising test scores.  It's like practicing "Smoke On The Water" over and over again on guitar...eventually you'll be really good at that song, but if someone asks you to play a whole set at a gig, you're fucked.  These kids get absolutely pounded into the ground with drills for open responses, but half of them don't know what they're talking about, and I daresay that more than half of them crumble when writing outside the very prescriptive and static confines of such a writing environment.

I consider it rather unfortunate that Plumberville has been honored and awarded repeatedly over the past month for these achievements.  The increase in MCAS scores is one of the primary reasons that Plumberville High went from a Level 3 school (considered low-performing but not bad enough to get taken over by the state) to a Level 1 school (highest possible rank) in the Massachusetts school accountability ranking system.  The administration's collective reactions to the MCAS scores and subsequent student growth percentile (or SGP, a number that indicates individual student improvement on the MCAS in Math and ELA) was nothing short of orgasmic.  The English department head came around to classes on the day the MCAS scores were officially released and joyously congratulated the students on their data.  The kids had no idea what SGP was or what it meant to be a Level 1 school, but the department head was happy, so it must be good news.

The reason I consider this delight to be unfortunate is that it's only reinforcing a shitty direction of curriculum and instruction.  The emphasis on open responses and test preparation did, indeed, allow PHS to achieve its goal of raising test scores, but there is no "and then..."  The test scores were the end point.  My response to the gleeful announcements of success is an internal So fucking what?  The delight with the test scores comes from a deep, willful misunderstanding of the purpose of assessments.  It's not Plumberville's fault (see these articles, many by Diane Ravitch), but they are going with a flow that is not a good flow with which to go.  Public education in America is jumping off a bridge and Plumberville, heedless of its parents' warnings about peer pressure and mindless social conformity, is jumping too.

If you ask any educator about the purpose of assessments (in theory, not in practice as in the case of the MCAS), you'll probably get an answer like, "to see how we're doing, to see where we're succeeding and where we could improve, and to make our instruction better."  This rationale has been so twisted and perverted by policy-makers and heads-too-busy-being-up-asses-to-be-in-classrooms top-level administrators that the spirit of education and assessment's role in education has been discarded in favor of a completely new reality: selectively-collecting data that doesn't necessarily represent good teaching or good learning, but it's data we know how to work with, and then using that data to make huge generalizations about every student, teacher, classroom, and school which then means huge decisions get made based on those generalizations.  Because the data from assessments is being used to drive instruction and all decision-making from top to bottom, the raising of test scores becomes the goal rather than a measurement tool.  It's like keeping your car's engine topped off with motor oil so that you don't disappoint the dipstick.  The logic is completely backwards.

I can't blame Plumberville for being this way, at least not with anything more than some frustration in my heart.  The fucked up assessment-is-the-goal point of view is not only common among public schools across the country, it's being actively encouraged by both state and federal programs and mandates.  Instead of improving the school in order to improve the test scores, many schools (generally those with a history of low performance on standardized assessments and not a lot of money in the coffers) don't bother taking a holistic approach, instead targeting the test - what appears to be the simple solution to the proposed problem actually kind of ruins everything forever.

It is with all of these thoughts and feelings roiling around in my head that I find myself carving out a space at Plumberville High School for little ol' me.  Given the rhetoric and cult-like obsession with test scores that was so aggressively transmitted in every encounter I had in my summer professional development, I worried that I had left one flawed tiny alternative program to end up in a just-as-flawed huge high school, and that I may not have chosen the best place to work.  My personal education philosophy, or Every Education Grad Student's First Paper, conflicts so directly with the emphasis on assessment and top-down micromanage-y mandates regarding what is taught and how (particularly in grades 9 and 10, where the classes within each grade level are so uniform that one could almost rotate the teachers and hardly tell the difference between them), I figured I wouldn't last a year at Plumberville.  Either they would find my alternative-education whole-student tests-are-just-tests-man approach to be inappropriate for the setting and would can me in June or I would become so disillusioned and my delicate sensibilities would be so offended (I do declare!) that I would leave after a year.

I have found myself thinking less and less this way in the last few weeks.  I have two things to thank for this.  First, my students are fucking great.  I don't mean that they are all high-achievers or even universally kind-hearted and motivated beyond belief.  Frankly, some of them are shitheads and some of them don't care very much and many of them are not trying as hard as they could.  But that's not what I'm talking about.  They are interesting.  They come to class.  They ask and answer questions.  They smile and laugh when things are funny, get outraged when things are unfair, and feel pity for fictional characters going through a hard time.  They show depth and range as human beings that I admire.  Sometimes I want to beat them half to death for making bad decisions or not demonstrating the thing I taught them all week and then we have to do it over again...but if I didn't like them, I wouldn't give a shit if they made good choices or learned anything.  I'm already deeply invested in their learning and success, as whole people, and I want them to do better, to shoot for their maximum potential even if they never quite reach it.  It made me a little sad when they got their MCAS scores and announced with delight "I'm advanced!" and "I'm proficient!"  Labeling these kids does absolutely nothing for them.  It's borderline toxic, but we do it anyway.  I want so badly for them to get beyond those useless labels and call themselves things like "driven" or "skilled" or "improving".

The other factor that has shifted my thinking was a brief meeting I had with my department head a couple of weeks ago.  Before school began, one of our many staff meetings addressed the issue of reading aloud in classes.  Apparently PHS used to do what I did at EDCO, which is to read aloud almost all of the novels together in class.  Students either struggled with the reading at home or didn't bother to do it, so it was done in class.

[If you're discussing and exploring the text as you read aloud, it takes about 4 minutes to read a page of a novel written at the high school reading level (an estimate I came to confirm many times over when reading 10 pages in a 45-minute class at EDCO) - this number is less when you don't bother to discuss, explain, or question as you go, but I'm talking about maximum depth and coverage as you read.  If this number is our basis for calculations, a 250-page novel would take 1000 minutes to read aloud, or 18 55-minute class periods (the length at PHS), assuming you read from bell to bell.  Given that classes only meet 36 times per quarter and the general rule of thumb is one novel per quarter, that means that literally half of class time would be spent just reading the text.]

The English department head found this kind of ridiculous, which I agree with, and she decided that much more reading needed to be done at home.  At the end of last school year, against the wishes of many of the teachers, she dictated the appropriate percentages of at-home reading based on course level.  Honors classes would read 100% of the text at home, standard levels would read 75% at home, and the lower-level skills courses would work up from 25% to approach 75% by the end of the year.  If those numbers seem fine, I guess, but totally arbitrary to you...well, you're not wrong.  As soon as I was presented with the percentages, ever fiber of my being rebelled at the idea of being told exactly how many pages of a novel are permitted to be read in class.  Their Eyes Were Watching God, the first novel for juniors, is 193 pages.  Does that mean that 48 pages may be read in a standard class, but 49 is unacceptable?  And which 48 pages are we talking about?  For honors, is reading even a single page verboten?

When I (and my colleagues) raised these concerns to the department head, she acknowledged that there would, of course, always be appropriate times to read in class.  The first page of a chapter, the very beginning of a novel, a pivotal scene, or anything for close reading of a small section...these are all reasonable things to read together, regardless of level.  So with these figures in mind but the ever-present voice of reason urging me to make good instructional choices independent of the numbers, I forged ahead with my plans and lessons.  The first time my department head came to observe, she did so while we were reading the first few pages of chapter 2, the first "real" chapter of a novel told as a frame narrative (story-within-a-story) and a crucial scene where some wacky shit happens under a pear tree.  As soon as she walked in, I knew exactly what conversation we would be having later.  I changed nothing about the lesson, delighted when my students put two and two together ("you mean that 'ecstatic shiver' and 'limp and languid' are sexy words?!?"), and went on with my day.  My expectations were met when my department head later reminded me of the percentages we had discussed and warned me of the dangers of "getting caught up in the reading" as if this were antithetical to good instruction, like, at all.

I nodded politely and left the meeting feeling as though all of my negative assumptions and impressions were correct, and I was doomed to hate this job, get fired, or both.  A short time later, the aforementioned department head sent out a survey to all the ELA teachers with general questions like "Do you have any classes or students that you're concerned about?" and "What could the department be doing to help or support you?" and so on.  It was not anonymous.  I figured that there was no reason to play games with my thoughts, and I answered the questions tactfully but honestly, making sure to mention in particular that I felt as though my instruction were being micromanaged with the reading percentages.  Later, when my department head asked me to meet with her, we discussed the variety of topics in my replies, including this.  The exchange, if you'll forgive a crude foreshortening of a paraphrase, went something like this:

Department Head: You expressed some concern about the reading percentages and everything.  Well, you know, those are really just guidelines.  You know best how to teach your own classes.
Me: Well, that's basically the opposite of the message we've been getting from you.
DH: Yeah, but, you know, the percentages are just to get people to move in the right direction.
Me: Yeah, except when I followed your precise instructions for acceptable exceptions to the read-less-in-class guideline, you still gave me feedback that instructed me not to read in class with them.
DH: Yes, I did.  But..well...if I were worried about you, I would tell you.
Me: Um...okay.

And it was in that moment that I realized several things: first, my department head seems perpetually confused about reality, perception, perspective, and communication.  So I should listen but take things with a grain of salt unless all the other teachers give me the "no, really bro" signal.  Second, despite administration in general and my department head in particular appearing to have no faith in the abilities of the staff they themselves selected, apparently I am being trusted to teach, in a manner of speaking, so I should just do that, and do it well.  Third, and perhaps most importantly, my job is not to please my department head.  My job is to teach.  Me trying to get my department head to give me good feedback is just as stupid as PHS focusing on raising test scores.  You might get what you want, but you're missing the point.  If I do a good job, and try really hard, and am always improving, and I can stand by my work and say, "yes, I did these kids a service and I am proud of what I've done," then my department head's opinion is secondary.  If I'm proud of my work and she's not, then it's not a good place for me to work.  If I'm proud of my work and she is too, then all the prescriptive bullshit doesn't matter.

It's a little ironic that the conclusion I've come to, and the perspective I have now taken, is one espoused by administration with words but subverted with actions.  The headmaster, who interviewed me in the second round of the hiring process, paid a great deal of lip service to putting the kids first, building rapport with students and fostering a community of learners, so on and so forth.  The test obsession is NOT doing any of those things, but I don't think he or any of the other PHS administrators truly understand this conflict or are doing anything out of malicious intent.  They want the kids to do well, and they see test scores as the indicator of that, end of story.  For me, test scores are a piece of a complicated puzzle, and I will celebrate my students' successes in that area as I celebrate their other small victories -- coming to school on time for the first time in several days, finishing a particularly hard assignment, grasping the elusive figurative meaning of a passage in the novel, remembering a tricky literary device and how its used, getting a job at a place they've always wanted to work, performing well in a soccer game, or whatever else is important to them.

At an all-day professional development session before the recent long weekend, the day ended with a rousing chorus of the school song (which I had never heard) and the distribution of t-shirts that read "PHS WE'RE #1".  I felt the familiar doublethink conflict of simultaneously feeling inspired/energized by the proceedings and remaining cynical about the whole thing.  I made the active decision to let the former feelings win.  I like liking my school.  I changed into my new (very large) t-shirt before I left and wore it proudly about town.  It has already become my go-to bum-around-the-house shirt.  I wear it with pride, but also with the knowledge that the intention behind the shirt is good, even if the rationale and execution of the ideology ("we're #1" referring to our MCAS scores and Level 1 status) is fairly shitty.  It serves as both a positive symbol of my workplace and a cautionary tale about what happens when you aim for the wrong goals.  Pretty important for a stupid shirt.

There are a lot of reasons that Plumberville High could be really good for me.  The environment, job expectations, day-to-day tasks, and complicated inner-workings are all challenging in a way that I find productive and useful.  I'm learning every day, improving my practice and honing my skills, and hopefully becoming a better teacher with each class.  My vain and pompous hope is that, if I'm there long enough and I get good enough, I can be really good for Plumberville High School too.  Not as a subversive secret agent who defies the administration's edicts and gives the kids the real scoop but rather as a community leader who pushes for positive change and open communication to improve every class and the working and learning environments for everyone in the building.  We'll see if I survive my first year, and if PHS likes me enough to keep me.  I'm still finding my place, learning the ropes as they say, so it's too early to tell.  But I'm in a hopeful, positive place, mentally.  It's like being adopted by a dysfunctional, fucked up family.  It may be totally crazy sometimes, and there's a stranglin' or two, but at the end of the day, you're home.