OPINION: Too much testing, too little active learning
Alexander Heffner of Jericho is an undergraduate at Harvard University and president of Scoop Media (ScoopSeminar.org), an education nonprofit.
Race to the Top money is starting to come to New York State. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan awarded New York the estimated $700 million, in no small measure, because the state emphasized a new plan to link student performance on standardized exams with teacher evaluations. In his search for education reformers, Duncan also favored New York because of legislation enacted earlier this year to increase the presence of charter schools.
But by adopting the same testing-centric framework as every other state public school, these up-and-coming charter schools will struggle to produce a more successful framework for educating New York's youth. New schools with the same old emphasis on tests is not real change.
Even on Long Island, where many schools are considered among the best in the state - even the country - because of students' performance on exams, education reform must go beyond testing if we want to graduate well-informed and civic-minded students.
There's a place for assessment - and certainly accountability for student achievement - in every classroom. But this is not the single thread of the American educational experience, and, sadly, that's what standardized tests have become.
The combined force of the state Regents, advanced placement exams and college aptitude tests has wiped out much of society's thinking about what it means to be an educated citizen. Tests, instead of discussion and group-based learning, have become the bedrock of how we prepare children for society.
In avoiding dialogue and collaborative innovation - an avoidance I saw firsthand when I attended middle school in Jericho and see now in some classes at Harvard - we've lost sight of what real learning is all about.
The testing mania tends too often to create one of three students: the unengaged kid who settles for an uninteresting profession (she passes exams and thinks the world is infinitely standardized), the robotic almost-Orwellian guy who invariably follows the crowd (he's never been encouraged to challenge material in his curricula), and the successful test-taker who earns one lucrative corporate gig after another (she thinks the American way is to achieve for oneself and by oneself).
I don't want my third-grade brother, who is admirably excited to hop on the magic school bus every morning, to fall into one of these three molds. Thankfully, he hasn't yet - for good reason. Middle and high school classrooms could learn a lot from how K-5 operates, where teachers foster dynamic discussion, energize their students and oversee frequent group work. In turn, their kids love school.
I've had two particularly courageous teachers - one in Jericho and one in Cambridge - who departed from the "let me get through this material" mindset that deters student participation. In middle school, one U.S. history teacher explored historical periods through films (like "Dances with Wolves") and led class-long discussions comparing the movies to our texts.
The other is a psychology professor who lets his students teach course material from assigned homework. We students must be prepared to decide what the most important aspects of our readings are. The beauty of the class is that it's taught from the bottom up and not from the top down.
I'm not arguing that Jericho and similarly high-achieving districts shouldn't be heralded for first-rate test scores. But it would be gratifying if, with their clout, these districts worked together to redefine classroom pedagogy from teaching-to-the-test to new mechanisms of learning and assessment - reviving the good traditions used in my brother's elementary school classes.
We should know by now that testing is too often a perfunctory fix - and that the money New York is about to use deserves to be better spent.
