Teaching to the Test
By Eva Syrovy
It wasn’t a complicated assignment. The students were to read an article comparing the benefits and deficits of handwritten letters versus texts/emails, make up their mind about which they thought was better, state their opinion, and support it using evidence from the article – the text.
The aim was pretty simple, too. In the PARCC tests, which almost all Colorado students will have to take this spring, they will have to peruse one or more selections, then write a well-supported reply to a question.
This is definitely a 21st century skill. If students are, as adults, to make intelligent decisions about whom to elect for mayor or school board member, whether to support a new facility that creates energy but has environmental costs, or even which car to purchase, they will need to be more-than-competent consumers of text.
And if they are to get a decent job in the information age, they’d better be pretty good producers of text as well.
In my middle school, we explicitly teach students how to decide on an opinion, how to find evidence to support it, how to draw the connection between the opinion and evidence. In our No Child Left Behind turned Race To The Top world, we’d be crazy not to.
And three times a year, we practice. All the students, at the same time, read the same article, choose a side, and argue for it in writing. We teachers then carefully read their compositions, match them against a rubric listing specific criteria, and assign each paper a grade. We joyfully read to each other the pieces that show unexpected humor or writerly brilliance. And about some, we argue.
I had one of each the other day. A girl wrote beautifully about how lovely it is to get a letter, how the greater effort to write one demonstrates real regard for the receiver. I read her entire opening paragraph aloud, with its engaging exclamations and wonderfully descriptive adjectives. I gave her a 4, the highest grade.
The handwriting of the next composition was sloppier, and many of the initial words in sentences were not capitalized; none of that was a factor, we were grading for content, not mechanics.
This student, too, opined that handwritten letters were better than cell phone and computer generated messages. He reasoned that electronics damage the environment, and that if we didn’t use them so much, perhaps the air would be cleaner and people could breathe better and be happier.
His argument was interesting, but, in the text that students were to cite, there was no mention of environmental damage. “Not relevant,” the teacher in charge of the rating process told me. Dutifully, I assigned the paper a grade of 1, indicating marginal performance, and moved on.
Later, though, I remembered that I had once heard a lecture on just this topic.
“Do you realize,” a teacher told her students, going for drama, illustrating the carnage caused by the mining of rare earths required for electronic manufacture, and by the disposal of discarded electronics, “that every time you get a new cell phone, you kill a tiger?”
And I wondered, had this student heard a something similar, and decided to integrate that information into his argument? And who are we, anyway, to tell kids that they can only use some, not all, of their knowledge in the writing they do? Are we really raising competent consumers of information, or just people who read and write what they’re told?
You decide.
Me, I worried about the effect my poor rating might have on the earnest young writer – until one recent night, when I had dinner with my son, a sophomore in high school.
“Do you have to take the PARCC this year?” I asked
“Yeah,” he replied between bites of pizza. “No big deal, though, Mom.”
“The practice test seemed pretty challenging – have you taken it yet?”
“Yeah, it was just some deal where you had to read two articles and determine the symbolism. I can do that stuff in my sleep.”
I must have looked skeptical, because he continued, “This one friend was all worried about it, and he asked, ‘what if I fail this test- how will this affect me?’ He’s been home schooled so he didn’t have to do testing before.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I said it wouldn’t make any difference to him at all. He said, ‘Why do we have to take it then?’ and I said ‘So they can fire teachers, man!’”
And my son is right. So, in 2015, we keep teaching to the test.
Eva Syrovy lives and teaches in Colorado Springs. She is a regular contributor to the Denver Post and other publications. This piece on testing is exclusive to the Greater Park Hill News.