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Give our governor credit for courage, anyway. His predecessor, Roy Romer, quivered every time the Colorado Education Association so much as stirred, but Bill Owens last week ventured before a convention of the Colorado Association of School Executives in Breckenridge, and took on their complaints about state-mandated testing -- the Colorado Student Assessment Performance tests whose results were released a few days ago.
One common educator complaint is that the tests take too much time. Just what the tests take time away from is an open question: would it be bully-prevention, dodge-ball substitution, holistic refusal skill inculcation, multi-cultural diversity appreciation, whole-language mastery, sensitivity development, character enhancement, multi-media deconstructive revisionism or some fad yet to emerge for public consumption?
Owens told the educrats that with all due respect,
you have some teachers in your schools that have children
spending more time watching movies than taking
tests.
This implies that movies are not really educational (although I must say that when I managed a porn theater in 1974, I learned that humans are capable of contortions that I had never even imagined), but that isn't why audience members complained.
A Durango educrat said that Owens' statement was very
inflammatory. Our teachers are very hard-working. They're
not slacking off. That isn't the issue.
So what is the issue, if it isn't the governor's observation that if a school district can find time for movies, odds are that it can find time for standardized achievement tests?
Colorado educators have been more than critical of the tests ever since they were proposed, and their whining is rather predictable:
· Teachers start teaching to the tests, thereby depriving students of -- of what? Just what skills do students fail to master because their pedagogues were focused on an upcoming CSAP?
Is there a teacher who can honestly say that We
didn't get around to intransitive verbs this semester
because we had to concentrate on gerunds for the CSAP?
or that We spent so much time on means, medians and
modes for the CSAP that we didn't have time to learn to
calculate how many Colorado bears will die on account of
habitat reduction for the benefit of the real-estate
industry, let alone derive the formula for profits that
result from campaign contributions that legalize habitat
destruction.
Without some solid evidence along that line, what's
wrong with having teachers teach to
something, like
a test?
· The CSAP is a high-stakes exam,
and it
could result in educators moved from positions or
removed from positions, placed in other assignments,
according to Steve Pratt, who recently resigned after four
heirs as director of the Colorado Association of School
Executives.
And? Don't they get moved and removed anyway? Is CSAP a worse reason for this motion than failure to brown-nose the superintendent or missing a curriculum committee meeting?
The World Series is a high-stakes test
for
pitchers, batters and fielders. And by analogy with school
executives, the baseball managers whose teams fail to pass
such exams often end up removed from positions.
Newspaper editors whose publications lose circulation get
removed from positions,
even if it's rather unfair
to judge the quality of reporting and commentary and
photography and design merely by how many people chose to
buy the paper each morning.
So, before we worry about whether the CSAP is a
high-stakes exam,
perhaps someone should explain why
school executives deserve special protections.
· It isn't fair to judge educators, schools and whole districts by the results of one series of tests, when education involves so much more than those numbers.
There is truth in this, because there is much that standardized tests don't measure, especially the important American success skills like aggression, back-stabbing, spinning, blame-transference, hypocrisy, etc.
Back when I was in high school, a teacher told me that I was very good at writing criticism, but that I should also make an effort to offer something constructive.
That seems like good advice for the school administrators, too. They have made it abundantly clear that they don't like the CSAP.
But every Colorado taxpayer sends money to the public schools, and myriads of Coloradans also send their children to the public schools.
And we'd like to know which schools are doing the job and which aren't. Since we pay the bills, and because we are ultimately responsible for our children, we would appear to have a right to that knowledge.
Given that, the school executives should either make a case that this is none of our business, or else they should come up with some method of evaluation to replace the CSAP that they so despise. Until then, the governor deserves an A.
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