As a side project in the final weeks of this semester, my Comp II students read and responded to Kenneth Bernstein's lately popular tour de force "A warning to college profs from a high school teacher." The piece, written on the occasion of Bernstein's retirement from teaching high school civics, first appeared in the journal Academe. The article entered the public conversation when it was reprinted for the Washington Post online column "The Answer Sheet." Bernstein, whose retirement happens to coincide with the entry of the first generation of students educated under No Child Left Behind into college, argues that the incessant standardized testing that has come with NCLB has created a generation of students who are unprepared for college. This is because, according to Bernstein, school curriculum from the third grade on is designed to help students pass the yearly tests. This type of pedagogy, which focuses on memorizable and repeatable material, test-taking strategies, and so on, dominates the curriculum, pushing out any pedagogies that inculcate the kinds of critical thinking and analysis expected in college.
This is not a new argument. Even if I think he's right (I do), I have to admit that these arguments are a little tired. Every generation, it seems, has a reason why the next generation is less prepared. So, though I think Bernstein is likely at least partly right, his argument smacks of the Myth of the Golden Age fallacy. And these arguments are not uncommon. This argument is repeated by critics of NCLB, the new critics of Common Core, and (germane to my own research) by high school teachers convinced that the internet is destroying the English language (it's not, by the way). Such pronouncements that the sky is falling are common in the public conversations about education. What is not common in the public conversation are the actual views of the students effected by these policies. Now that the first of these students have finally reached college, the time is right to ask what they think about their own preparation.
This became the goal of the side project I am relating here. In order to give a voice to these students, my class read about the issue, responded in a couple of online discussion board posts, and finally hosted an open discussion to which we invited interested stake holder experts in the field including our writing director, English Department chair, the Vice President for Academic Affairs, and a professor from the education department who specializes in assessment. We also had guests from off campus including a former State Teacher of the Year who is now the program director of a non-profit that supports our state's largest urban school district. (We also invited a couple classroom teachers but, ironically, they were both busy proctoring standardized tests on the day we hosted our discussion). These experts were invited to participate, but primarily as passive audience members who were allowed to ask questions.
Our discussion came primarily from the issues that came up in our discussion board posts, which began with a fairly straightforward question: Bernstein argues that standardized testing under NCLB is the reason students are unprepared for college. So, did you feel unprepared for college? If so, in what ways? On the other hand, do you feel that you were in fact prepared and, if so, what kinds of things prepared you?
I was actually surprised at how many students reported that they did feel like they were prepared for college learning. Admittedly, there are a few of them whose writing caused me to question whether or not they are prepared as they think they are. But by and large, these are typical second semester students, no worse than those I taught when I first started teaching composition in 2007. What was also surprising to me was how few students mentioned testing, or even curriculum, in their posts. Certainly, some of the savvy students knew that these posts were in response to an article about testing, so their answers should probably mention this. But testing was never the center of their posts, and came up very rarely in the narratives we heard during our discussion. This was true both of students who reported feeling prepared and those that didn't.
Many reported that they felt unprepared for the kinds of writing they would do. Others mentioned being unprepared for the work load, having never really had to do substantial and substantive homework before. But most of these students felt that, overall, they were prepared and so these news ways of learning were a matter of adjustment. Those few who reported feeling completely unprepared did not blame testing, or even mention it. Instead, their narratives focused on a lack of support in the classroom. One student, who was raised in a military home, talked about how often he moved to new schools. Most of these schools, he says, were very poor. Teachers were dealing with large class sizes with few resources, where they were having to provide supplies for their classrooms. This led to situations in which the teachers were often over worked and burnt out, and he often felt that he was being left to his own devices to try to learn. Significantly, he never wrote an academic essay, even of the maligned five paragraph variety, until he got to college.
In contrast to his experiences, my students who reported feeling well prepared came almost exclusively from middle class, even wealthy, suburbs. When asked what made them feel prepared, a surprising number of them did not even mention curriculum. Instead, they talked occasionally about involved teachers, and many of them talked about their parents, often mentioning that they were expected to perform well. One student even explicitly stated that what he learned in the classroom had nothing to do with the fact that he feels prepared. For him, most of what is most difficult to adjust to in college does not relate to curriculum, but instead includes the life changes that come with college: getting used to work load, and working a part time job, and living away from home for the first time. For this reason, the people who most prepared him were his coaches and relatives who stressed work ethic and resilience.
Interestingly, these responses suggest that, at least in the eyes of our students, our ability to be successful in college has less to do with coursework than we might assume. Instead, those students who feel most prepared had positive and involved support systems including teachers, parents, coaches and others.
This probably shouldn't be so surprising. In literacy studies, we've known at least since Deborah Brandt began her grounded theory studies of literacy sponsorship that family support systems have far more to do with literate ability than in-school experiences. If this is true in all areas of learning, perhaps when we assess our students' success, we have to begin to look beyond connections between test scores, textbooks, and curriculum. When our schools are failing, perhaps our texts and lesson plans aren't the first place we should look. Perhaps we should figure out where these extracurricular influences are failing or missing, and find ways to intervene in these areas. Standardized tests tell us very little about these things. In fact, as others have argued, standardized tests may do even more harm to these students since tests tend to privilege the kinds of knowledge not available to children in marginalized communities, where these support systems are often most lacking.
Alternative Assessment:
So we may know that the kinds of things we learn about our students through testing them may not actually predict their preparedness for college, but the fact remains that we do need some way to assess our students. We have to find out what they are learning. It might be very trendy for us teachers to hate standardized testing and to talk about how damaging it is. But we are doing little good if we are not able to propose alternative methods of assessment. With regard to this, we can learn here from our home schooled and private school students.
At the university where I teach, a midwestern Christian university representing a fairly conservative demographic, we have a healthy number of students who were not in public schools, but who were educated in private schools or were home schooled. Most of the students in my class who were educated at home or in private schools had never taken a standardized test except for the SAT and ACT college entrance exams. Yet, all of them are at least proficient. A couple of them are among my best students. So we may have much to learn by looking at the ways in which these students were assessed.
One young man reported that his schooling was very independent. He was often learning on his own, reading and completing home school curriculum. In order to assess his learning, his parents made him teach them the material he had been reading. This was, as it turns out, a bit problematic. He reports that his parents, who were not highly educated themselves, often knew less about his subjects than he did. So, he was responsible for his learning in a way that most educators would not be comfortable with. Certainly, his success has come in part through his own ability and self-motivation, but his parents' method of assessment, albeit possibly an accident of their own insufficiency, did some very important things. By having to relate to his parents what he had learned, he had to become conversant with the subject. He had to go beyond the ability to recognize the right answer on a multiple choice test. Insead, he had to achieve literacy of the subject in order to choose relevant knowledge, compress it into manageable parts, and relate it to another person in a communicative way.
Literacy of the subject matter was even more important for one young woman in my class, whose parents were much more purposeful in their assessment. This young woman reports that her parents required a great deal of writing in which she was expected to critically engage her subjects, writing in a way that showed her comprehension of each subject. Her mother's grade, which was not necessarily attached to quantifiable, objective measures (like a test), was assigned based on her mother's impression of how well she did in the subject over the course of the year. It was, in a sense, "made up." Yet, despite never taking a standardized test, and having been assigned grades by arguably dubious standards, she is one my my brightest composition students.
Bernstein's biggest critique of NCLB in general and standardized testing in particular is that tests cannot prepare students for the kinds of critical thinking expected of them in college. Because of this, we're invited to assume, strategies that prepare students for testing privilege thinking strategies that do not depend on critical thinking. Indeed, one of my students related that teachers were often teaching test-taking strategies, aimed at helping students figure out answers to questions they did not actually know. In this sense, and if this is common, a certain amount of public school curriculum focuses not on academic subjects at all, but on how to fool the tests.
What's striking about the forms of assessment more common for my home schooled and privately schooled students is that they don't just assess what a student has learned by testing their knowledge on a multiple choice test. Instead, their methods of assessment (critical essay writing, "teaching" the material) have pedagogical aims of their own. In relating what they had learned, these students also had to become conversant with the material, synthesize it, and construct arguments from and about it. In these models, assessment does double duty. It tests a students knowledge of their subjects while also teaching the skills, conventions, and ways of thinking privileged in college classes.
Certainly, these forms of assessment aren't quantitative, and thus don't necessarily carry the pretense of objectivity. But they are better. And so public school systems may have much to learn from these methods that might help us to develop forms of assessment that are more productive for our students.
