The Wire: Teaching to the Test Revisited

Matt Yglesias makes some thoughtful observations about yesterday's Wire post, generating a bunch of really interesting comments about NCLB and test prep over on his site. It's great to see some actual discourse on this topic—both because claims of "unintended consequences" often are unexamined and because they are sure to loom large when Congress gets around to reauthorizing the law.

I agree with Matt that my evidence doesn't prove drill-and-kill teaching to the test isn't happening in lots of places, but just to be clear I didn't set out to prove that. Instead, I'm arguing that teaching to the test is 1) a choice being made by school systems, 2) a bad choice, and 3) an unnecessary choice. It's a choice because there are other alternatives. It's a bad choice because those alternatives are better for kids and for society. And it's an unnecessary choice because research shows that good teaching—instruction that helps kids master basic skills and encourages deep understanding of math and language—actually produces higher test scores than narrowly teaching to the test.

I also agree with Matt that the solution is not to stop testing. Would anyone argue that Baltimore's elected officials and fourth estate should stop looking at crime statistics and putting pressure on the police system to improve public safety? Of course not. Any politician who argued they should stop doing that because it causes the police department to play tricks with numbers would be voted out of office (or should be). The key is to collect data and hold the system accountable while at the same time expecting the department to engage in good, authentic police work to improve public safety, rather than simply juking the numbers. And we should expect the same of school systems.

Of course, that raises some questions, too. Why are systems choosing to juke the numbers rather than doing their jobs more effectively? I would argue that some schools and districts do it because they believe that poor and minority kids really can't learn the math and language skills in question, so instead they help them game the tests without really mastering the content. Some are probably doing so out of ignorance: They've heard they are "being forced to teach to the test" and similar rhetoric so often that it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy; I fear that many educators truly believe they have no other choices. In both cases, we should do more to "educate educators" that there are better alternatives and that those alternatives work just as well for poor and minority kids.

However, as some have argued over on Matt's site, other schools and districts might know there are alternatives, but feel forced to take shortcuts because they believe they lack the capital--human, material, intellectual--to work more effectively. For example, in the world of The Wire, school system leaders might have issued the test prep directive because they believe their teachers really are not capable of teaching math and reading very well. But even if that is the case, we should focus on that question and look to building capacity, rather than getting rid of tests and accountability, as the next frontier of public policy-making.

--- Guestblogger Craig Jerald