I don’t know about you, but I’m fed up with all the hand-wringing about test scores of children in our public schools. We are by and large a state that will not do what is needed to increase academic achievement among all our students, so our test scores should be no surprise.
You can’t fly in the face of research, cutting programs that boost intellectual development, and those that encourage buy-in from students to schooling, and then complain when student scores drop on measures of learning. You can’t take away physical activity and play, the natural elements of childhood, and expect good results.
Contemporary measures of achievement no longer favor rote memorization and simple multiple choice questions. Those are relics of a by-gone age before computers entered our households and our schools en masse. The tests that provide the benchmarks we wring our hands over require increasingly sophisticated thinking skills. Many nations and states understand this and provide the intellectual training needed for their students to do well.
If Governor LePage’s school report cards are useful at all, it is to show that Maine does not provide what students need to do well on the tests he values. The irony is that he is ultimately responsible for cuts to programming that help degrade those very student scores.
I believe what LePage is missing is a recognition that you can’t just bang into people’s brains the answers to current standardized test questions. The tests require thinking, and careful thought is the outgrowth of a broad, rich, developmentally-appropriate curriculum taught by excellent teachers who are given what they need to do what they love as well as they possibly can.
If the teaching profession is treated without respect, and job satisfaction is so low that nationally the average longevity of teachers in the profession is only five years, of course our students will not thrive. Local school district leaders need to make the effort to find out why teachers are not thriving as professionals. If they do not have this conversation there is no possibility student educational outcomes will increase.
Throwing darts and wringing hands is clearly not working. It’s time to take off the gloves and begin the hard – but exciting – work of really improving student learning outcomes.
