"Teaching to the Test"

It sounds stark and tedious. But there are more and more tests, and more and more mandates from more and more levels of government, and someone's got to help kids faced with taking them.

At my school, we've spent a great deal of time and energy devising a formulaic approach for ESL students to pass the English Regents, and we've been very successful at that--our ESL students are passing at about the same rate as native students. For them it's a high stakes test--they can't graduate without it.

I don't much like what we're teaching them--four paragraph canned "essays" with prescribed references to a handful of so-called "literary terms." I'm almost certain that the skills we give them are useful only for passing the test. Were I teaching writing, I'd find these compositions artificial, tedious, uninteresting and unsatisfactory.

I also strongly feel that their time would be better spent improving their English language skills, oral, written and otherwise. Works of literature are chosen for their brevity rather than quality, in order to give them as large an inventory as possible with which to respond to the literature question.

It would be nice to give Governor Pataki or Education Commisioner Richard Mills six months to pass the same test in Korean, and see how they fare. But my druthers are little help for my students, few of whom wish to reach middle age while still in high school.

My daughter has been taking standardized tests since kindergarten in the form of something called the "Terra Nova." At first, I was amazed at her scores--though she couldn't read at all, she scored very high in reading. Yet she had a very low score in English. Her teacher later told me the same discrepancy applied to most of her classmates--the reading portion came first, and English last. Most of the 5-year-old test takers were too bored to pay attention by then.

Now in third grade, she was struggling this year, so I sent her to "Score," a chain run by Kaplan. She spends two hours a week working on computer programs based on standardized tests. Her Terra Nova scores improved tremendously after four or five months there. I have to recommend this place (Full disclosure--unfortunately, I'm not a paid spokesperson.) to any fellow parents freaking out over their children's test scores.

Does the "Terra Nova" test really measure important things? Frankly, I have no idea. But she takes it anyway, and fourth grade is largely geared toward taking a major test here in New York, so what choice do we have? And what choice do my students have?

If your students have a high-stakes test, you pretty much have to help them do as well as possible. And if your own kids have one, you have to do the same. If that means "teaching to the test," what viable alternative is there?

(I wrote much of this as a response to something Instructivist posted.)