Teach-to-the-Test Culture Could Be Hindering Workforce
April 25, 2005

By Steve Peha

Over the last 15 years, every state in the country has gone through an arduous process of creating academic standards for their students. These standards represent the new curriculum. But is it really so new? Or have we merely codified the traditional academic values of the past? How do we know that the standards-based system we've created will get kids ready for college, improve workforce preparedness, and serve our society's needs in the future? For businesses looking to hire the workforce of the future, these are crucial questions.

The guiding principle of the standards movement is simple: what gets standardized gets tested, what gets tested gets taught. By adhering strictly to the standards-based approach, schools can address the issue of curricular inconsistency and, over time, provide students with a better education. At least that's the theory.

Missing in Action
When I first heard about the standards movement in the early 1990s, I was excited. What a great idea, I thought back then, to align our curriculum with current thinking on what kids needed to be successful in life. And even though I've never been a big fan of testing, I liked what politicians were saying about using testing to insure a rigorous curriculum and establish high expectations.

But a comprehensive curriculum aligned to real-world requirements measured by rigorous testing isn't what we got. As a recent study by Achieve, Inc. called The Expectations Gap: A 50-State Review of High School Graduation Requirements, concluded: "No state requires its graduates to take the courses that reflect the real-world demands of work and postsecondary education."

And this is hardly an isolated opinion. A report entitled Crisis at the Core: Preparing All Students for College and Work, from Act, Inc, the independent non-profit organization that publishes the popular ACT college admissions test, had this to say: "Far too many of the seniors in the class of 2004... aren't ready for college or the workplace. And it seems unlikely that students already in the pipeline will be doing much better." In a similar vein, another report, Learning for the 21st Century, published by The Partnership for 21st Century Skills, stated that even after more than a decade of work on standards-based reform "there remains... a profound gap between the knowledge and skills most students learn in school and the knowledge and skills they need in typical 21st century communities and workplaces."

Instead of setting high standards, we seem to have lowered the bar to the point where students can pass tests by getting only 50%-60% of the points available. And while this problem could be fixed simply re-norming the scoring systems and raising the requirements for passing, our curriculum itself may have more fundamental weaknesses.

Instead of focusing standards on the future, we seem to have focused them on the past. While most states have standards in traditional subject areas like reading, writing, math, social studies, and science, most students are not required to study these disciplines very deeply. In addition, few states have comprehensive standards for things like:

o Technology. While most kids do get some experience focused on basic computer operation, there's virtually nothing for kids in areas like computer programming, database development, interactive design, or information theory.

o Emotional Intelligence. Popularized by researchers like psychologist Daniel Goleman, emotional intelligence, or "EQ" as it is sometimes called, has been shown to be a significantly stronger predictor of career success than good grades or high scores on traditional achievement tests.

o Financial Literacy. Money management and "personal" economics are crucial disciplines everyone needs to master to some degree. They also come in handy in the world of work, not just for accountants and project managers, but for all employees who benefit from understanding the financial profile of their companies, industries, and professions.

Educators would tell us that the current curriculum is full to bursting, that there isn't even time to teach what is already required. And from my experience, they would be right. So if the current approach to standards and testing isn't addressing the skills students need to succeed at work, and if there's no room left in the school day to pack in the skills of career-readiness, perhaps the choices that were made originally need to be rethought. And perhaps business leaders need to be involved in the rethinking.

The Realities of Rationing and Rationalizing in a Test-Driven System
To get a sense of what our kids are really studying, it's helpful to look beyond state standards documents to the evolving structure of testing and the practical impact this is having on how schools decide where to put their time and energy. Instructional time is a finite resource and how that time is spent is increasingly determined by the way school funding is tied to test performance. Every teacher has to make hard choices every day on how much time to devote to which aspects of the curriculum. And these days, it only makes sense to spend time on what is tested.

The most powerful vector in the new calculus of curriculum planning is the Bush Administration's No Child Left Behind legislation. Currently, NCLB requires states to test children in grades 3-8 in math and reading, a requirement that will likely be extened into high school in the coming year. From the day-to-day perspective of principals and teachers, this means school resources will increasingly be directed to helping children in specific sub-groups meet minimum requirements in reading and math.

Time and money are finite resources in our schools, and even though it isn't always this way, a zero-sum psychology pervades education culture. The result is that resources spent in one area are resources lost in others. And as the consequences for poor performance become more concrete, resources are increasingly allocated based on test scores. This is exactly what the architects of the current accountability system intended, so in this sense, reform could be said to be working well. But unintended -- though entirely predictable -- consequences could negate meaningful gains in student learning and undermine legitimate progress.

Cause and Effect
Over the last 10 years that I have been working in schools across the country, the most noticeable effects of the standards movement that I have witnessed are:

o More teaching to the test, less teaching to the students. Today, teachers focus more on contrived activities, sample test items, timed pre-tests, and other test prep techniques as opposed to research-based best practice methods. Authenticity, meaning, and differentiation are considered less important despite an overwhelming research consensus that these are key elements of high quality instruction.

o More rote learning, less real learning. The popularity of scripted lessons and programmed scope-and-sequence instruction has risen dramatically. Kids fill out more worksheets, answer more questions at the end of textbook chapters, and participate in more drills. Critical thinking is increasingly confined to pre-planned publisher-supplied exercises that closely resemble problems on tests.

o More reading, less writing. NCLB requires no proficiency in writing. As a result, states have already begun cutting back on writing assessments to save money. At the same time, colleges and companies, faced with increasingly large numbers of poorly prepared students and employees, are increasing the amount of remedial writing training they provide.

o More minimum competence, less maximum achievement. State tests, which are used to calculate NCLB performance, are "pass-fail" minimum competency tests. And the percentage of points needed to pass is low-generally between 40% and 60%. Many states are actually in the process of lowering their requirements even further or exercising statistical loopholes in current legislation that would allow them to exempt more students from being counted.

In my experience, the standards movement has had the effect of encouraging schools to move from best practice to bad practice all in the name of raising scores. And scores have gone up. Sort of. Scores on state tests have risen appreciably in most subjects and at most grade levels. But scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tell a very different story. Why the discrepancy? Because you can't prep for it.

Only some schools take the NAEP and they don't know who they are until just before the test. There are no sample released items, no test prep booklets, and no pre-aligned curriculum from a publisher who also owns the company that wrote the test. It's a test teachers can't teach to. It's also a national test-the same for every kid who takes it. By contrast, the 50 different state tests vary widely in degree of difficulty. For these reasons, the NAEP provides a more accurate view of how we're doing. And according to these numbers we're not doing well: from 1998 to 2003, we made almost no progress at all (just a slight gain in math); some states even got worse in some subjects.

A Contradiction in Terms
As I read the research on workforce preparedness and talk to business people around the country, I notice another contradiction. While surveys of business leaders indicate overwhelming support for the current approach to standards-based reform, much of the same research shows that the skills students are developing in standards-driven schools are the not the skills the business community says it needs.

Perhaps it's too early to tell how this will shake out. Perhaps, as our political leaders contend, we just need to give it more time. But when I think about what I see in classrooms across the country, I'm disinclined to be that patient. Standing at the intersection of classroom and board room, I don't see how the current approach will deliver the results we need when it comes to workforce preparedness.

To have a workforce capable of helping businesses meet the challenge of an increasingly competitive global economy, a different approach to reform is needed-one that focuses on helping students develop high levels of proficiency in the real-world competencies they will need to succeed in the workplace of tomorrow.

Employers know best what that world is and how it is likely to change in the future. So it just makes sense for them to speak up and assert their values -- and for educators and politicians to start listening. If current reform is based on standard transmission, business needs to kick it into overdrive.

Steve Peha is founder and president of Teaching That Makes Sense, Inc., an education consulting and reform organization with offices in Chapel Hill, N.C., Kansas City, Mo., and Seattle, Wash.
© copyright 2005 by Teaching That Makes Sense, Inc. Used by permission.

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