Teaching to the test

When Congress passed the “No Child Left Behind” educational bill My Lady was adamant that requiring students to pass a centralized test and making the test score the only requirement of proficiency would eventually lead to an environment of “teaching to the test” where instruction would be focused on passing the test and not on the ability to understand and apply the subject matter.

I silently agreed with her, but since I grew up in a state that had a state wide final exam where no one knew the test questions prior to the day of testing I had hopes that her prophecy would not come true. Silly me. As time went by I saw more and more cases of teachers being lazy and not teaching the subject but merely teaching the students how to take and pass the test. But I was unprepared for what I recently read about in a legal journal.

It seems that a group of teachers at one school, and their school administration (not to be named in order to protect the guilty) took advanced copies of the test and drilled the kids by showing them the questions and answers to the exam. As a result a number of kids will be held back a grade and forced to repeat their studies.

Isn’t that great! Teachers and adults conspire to rig an exam and when the scam comes to light the kids will suffer while the school superintendent is quoted as saying “In their minds they thought they were doing what was fair for the students”. In other words, it’s ok to cheat and to allow cheating if that makes the test scores better.

If the teachers, and administrators, aren’t fired I’ll be disappointed, but firing them would anly give them more time to hang out the state capitol protesting educational reform.