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Health & Fitness

The Unintended Consequences of Assessment Driven Curriculum



By Chris Williamson, Head of School, Applewild School


Voters every year face decisions about local budgets, and it is the school budget that often is the only significant part of the deliberation that receives public scrutiny. As I wrote in October, I would hope that communities invest in providing qualified teachers to assure a small teacher – student ratio. At the same time, I suggest we be suspicious about the simplistic way we are being encouraged to evaluate school success through the lens of assessment. In my last piece I referred to “HOTS” – Higher Order Thinking Skills. This is exactly what the testing industry has thus far found difficult if not impossible to test, and it is these skills which are desperately needed by our students for them to be competitive in the global economy.

It is an interesting paradox that at the same time that neuroscience is validating concepts such as portfolio assessment, outcomes based education, problem solving, multiple intelligences, interdisciplinary connectivity, and process, politicians, text book publishers and the testing industry have driven the enterprise toward high stakes testing. A good way of capturing this paradox is in the credentialing for college.

While all over Massachusetts, starting in fourth grade, students prep all year for the MCAS tests, college bound high school students are now taking a three section SAT I, with writing an equal component, and with more problem solving questions; and more colleges are moving away from the SAT I altogether as a helpful measure to predict student success. In other words, as flawed as it is, the SAT I is becoming less like the MCAS; but the MCAS and similar state tests are now driving curriculum decisions.

The introduction of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness of College and Careers (PARCC) test to replace the MCAS is simply another such test, attempting to standardize learning. Educators in Massachusetts argue persuasively that it either will or will not be an improvement on the MCAS; but the key point is that no matter which side is correct, it will still be a high stakes test that will dictate curriculum and undermine creativity.

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Independent schools do not have to focus on MCAS or PARCC, yet our students, from all walks of life, thrive in secondary school and college. They learn how to problem solve, think critically, write well, read for nuance. They develop HOTS because their teachers do not have to focus on MCAS assessments.

Accountability is essential, and independent schools most certainly are highly accountable in a very direct way. If our families do not feel we are living up to our mission, they simply leave. What is the best yardstick to measure accountability in the public sector? Is it really the MCAS scores – or PARCC?

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I read a Massachusetts history teacher’s lament recently that he could no longer teach a wonderful history unit that he and an English teacher had been team teaching. They asked students to research the origins of the Vietnam War, compare and contrast it to other historical events, and recreate and evaluate the decision making. It did not fit within what the MCAS tests, so they had to scrap it. I will leave it up to you to consider the implications of a population that does not understand the limitations of military power and the importance of the history and internal dynamics of other countries.

A teacher I know in New Jersey left independent education to make more money at a public school. A year later she was back because – in the fourth grade – she needed to track the number of minutes each day that she taught specific pages from the language arts and math books. She is a creative, able teacher. I wanted her to have the freedom to respond to the thunderstorm that occurred one day and turned into a science lesson for her students. When I was in Ohio, which was in the vanguard of the assessment - accountability movement in the early to mid-eighties, I watched schools abandon valuable units to accommodate to what was being tested at specific grades. The internet revolution encourage us to design our own individual type of jeans or car color, yet we are gravitating to a “one size fits all” education.

While we go in this direction, other countries have been copying what we used to be good at. Over the years, schools I have been associated with have been visited by delegations of educators from China, South Korea, Japan, and the Netherlands. What did they want to learn? Why would they come to the United States when our students allegedly lag far behind those from other countries in almost every area, and certainly in math and science? They recognized that our system was encouraging innovative thinking and problem solving. They were seeing their students as being able to crunch data but not be able to make use of it creatively – and they were intentional about figuring out how to address what they saw as a debilitating competitive disadvantage.

While other countries have been intentionally catching up to an innovative, problem solving approach, we have been simultaneously—with perverse intentionality – adopting “drill and kill” and “one size fits all” pedagogy. Thomas Friedman in The World Is Flat cautioned that we are losing our place as the nation of innovators. What led us to developing such innovative thinkers and problem solvers? It was teachers who saw the opportunity to teach about thunderstorms, the causes of Vietnam, to have time for class participation, to encourage asking questions, to know their students, and themselves to be innovative.

As Massachusetts moves from MCAS to Common Core and PARCC, let’s remember that the best education invites students to probe, question, analyze, consider alternatives, make connections. We need to know our students well and have the flexibility to engage their interests, to challenge them to think, to synthesize, to problem solve, to create. That remains a strength of independent education, that is why Applewild stresses Core Competencies, and that should be the goal of education reform: teacher student ratios and innovative, open ended assessment about skills and habits of mind that matter.

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