BRUNSWICK — It’s 10 in the morning, and I’m eavesdropping on conversations – a girl who wants to bust out of her customary genre, a boy searching for Laura Hillenbrand’s “Unbroken,” as he’s a war buff. Another fellow who wants to return to work in this very library, in a public school in a small town in Maine. I’m watching middle schoolers argue about books, take each other’s suggestions. I’m watching them thrive.
These conversations are so full of heart.
about the author
Charlotte Agell of Brunswick is an author-illustrator who teaches in the Yarmouth public schools.
It occurs to me that here is engagement, in the passion for reading, in the discussion of fate and character. Fiction is truth’s older sister indeed!
WHAT DO TESTS MEASURE?
Standardized tests – with their new focus on nonfiction – look like truth’s distant cousin to me. Here in this library is true learning and authentic community. Here are kids, setting out to figure out who they really are.
The testing? It sets out to stump and follows that up with trumpeting the failure.
What is success?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately– how lucky I am to work in a district where the administration doesn’t demand a canned reading program in a fear-based attempt to satisfy standards-based testing. The boy from this morning comes back to me, the one who asked the librarian, “Remember when I first started coming in here and I was reading just comics? Now look at me.” He’s the one who wants to become a librarian, in this very school. “Will you have a job for me?”
That boy fills me with gratitude.
Then I start asking questions. I’ve been in public education since the very early ’80s. The pendulum has swung this way and that. It’s now that I am most worried.
What are we doing to our kids?
They’re slated to sit for seven hours of high-stakes testing this spring, testing that will supposedly reflect on us as a district.
But will it? The release items I’ve encountered aren’t always so clear, and I have a master’s degree from Harvard.
What if we asked our public officials and captains of industry to sit for the Smarter Balanced Assessment (12th-grade edition) before we asked it of kids?
What if we made their scores terribly public?
What would we learn?
I suspect it would be that some people take tests well. I suspect it wouldn’t have much to do with how best to engage and to teach and to measure true growth.
Authentic assessment so often seems to come from within. Frankly, I miss the days of writing prompts and how we’d gather in a learning area to figure out what we considered to be good writing. This new approach is very “top-down.” Should we cede this level of control to strangers from afar? Will those scoring these tests spend adequate time on them, or will the process be formulaic and scattershot? (And, no, I do think that’s an oxymoron.)
DIFFERENT TIMES
Here we are, introducing our students to release items, so as to not blindside them. Is this teaching to the test? I’m not sure. We’ve always had standardized tests, of course, and they can teach us something. I’m not assessment averse.
But I can’t help feeling like these are different times.
I worry about our current national predilection for vilifying those who often spend dawn to night working for kids. I worry that those with the strongest passion for learning might not be lured into this demanding and utterly rewarding profession.
And I become cynical.
Has our secretary of education, Arne Duncan, ever been a teacher?
How many of the children of senators even go to public school?
Who is making the big money from all this?
The Common Core State Standards – adopted in such a rush – demand rigor and critical thinking. It’s only appropriate that we think critically about the Common Core and its attendant culture.
The question is: Do the new standards and required testing really promote meaningful, real-life rigor? Do they truly help us cultivate critical thinking? Do they have anything to do with how the mind really inquires, out of joy and the promise of new questions?
The jury is out – far out – and the accused are our children and teachers.
In our rush to be accountable, we may be losing what really matters.
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