I love the movie, “Independence Day.” The following are spoilers, but considering
it has been out for almost 10 years now I figure if you have not seen it you do
not want to. Yes, Pullman’s speech as
President Whitmore to the pilots before they launch their attack against the
alien ships still gives me goosebumps and remains great fodder for leadership
studies. Yes, Will Smith provides
perfect comic relief: “Welcome to earth,”
and, “Tell them I beat you up.” OK. I’m going to go watch it again when I finish
this post. But the absolute most far-fetched
scene, the most amazing thing in the entire movie despite all the special
effects and the notion of alien invasion, comes when the good guys decide to
launch a world-wide attack on the enemy, and the entire operation is
orchestrated by Morse Code. We see a
room filled with military guys click-click-clicking on old key pads hammering
out the code to the remaining military forces around the world who also
understand the code. Amazing. Our military no longer teaches Morse Code and
internationally it has been abandoned since the French Navy stopped using it in
1990. So, where in the world did they
find a room full of guys who still know Morse Code? In fact, I’ll wager that some of you reading
this post have no idea what Morse Code is.
I had to learn Morse Code as a Boy Scout in the early 1960’s. I still remember S.O.S., and that’s it. I could no more send or receive the code now
if my life hung in the balance. And yet,
I once knew it, I could send and translate, I was good only up to about 10 wpm,
but that was pretty good. So, the
question occurs to me, did I learn Morse Code and if so what is the evidence of
that? Shortly after instruction I proved
I knew it. Now, some 50 odd years later,
can I claim to know it? Nope. I knew it then, I do not know it now.
The same is true for my high school final exams. I am not sure I could pass any of them today,
though I was stellar in 1968. The same
for the finals in every college course I took.
I could then, I can’t now. So, is
there a time limit for the claim, “I know it”?
For how long after instruction must I be able to demonstrate my knowledge? An hour? A week? A month?
Six months? Five years? If you teach me something and immediately
test me I am very likely to do very well.
But if you teach me something today and test me next week I am not so
likely to do well. I forget, I have
slept since then, etc., etc. Again, I
will wager all readers of this post have experienced the very same phenomenon.
Yes, yes we have learned a lot about the brain and how to
teach in ways that provide meaning and extended practice, etc., to prolong the
time given information is likely to stick.
And yes, I can remember jokes from the 1960’s and not the periodic table
because jokes have meaning for me and there is nothing funny about the periodic
table. (Well, I can think of a few puns,
but they would be inappropriate.)
If I am a teacher of 5th grade science I know
that in the spring of this school year my students will be asked to answer a
series of questions about science. Their
answers are critical to them, to me, to my school and my district. I very much want my kids to know the right
answers. So, I cheat. If cheating is giving someone an answer they
do not know, then beginning in September I cheat and I tell them the answers to
the questions they are likely to get in May.
I continue to do so right up until the test, but it becomes impossible
to re-teach all that I have taught on the day before the test. I must hope that the answers I told them in
September remain in their brains. In
other words, for this test, a student must prove he or she knows something 8
months after they were taught and 8 months after they initially demonstrated
mastery to me in the classroom. I have
spent the year giving them answers, but if I give them answers on the day of
the test, I am “cheating” and will likely get fired and have my certificate
jerked. I find that both frightening and
hilarious. It is good teaching on May 10th,
it is career ending on May 11th.
So, does this test actually measure what 5th
graders know about science? Nope. It measures what 5th graders
remember about the science they learned months ago. If my students can demonstrate mastery of the
content I taught within the past week, is that not good enough? I have proof they learned it. That proof is not good enough for Texas,
though. They want cumulative proof and
they want to pay millions to test development companies to concoct these memory
exams under the guise of science tests.
Then we all hold our collective breaths to see how well 5th
grade memories work in the area of science and claim it is a measure of how
much science 5th graders know.
Poppycock and balderdash. Despite
every mnemonic device at our disposal, some kids will remember, some won’t.
High stakes standardized tests are immoral. They do not measure what they purport to
measure. The tests merely measure the
long-term memory skills of students in a given subject area, and not the
knowledge or skill a student has in a given subject area. To retain a single child using this measure
is absurd. To hold teachers accountable
based on this measure is absurd. To
label schools and districts based on this measure is absurd. And yet, we continue to do so with the tests
becoming increasingly difficult and challenging with each new iteration.
How do we convince legislators that high stakes standardized
tests are hooey? Do we ask them to take
their high school final exams again and publish the results? They would never do it as most would no
longer qualify as high school graduates and it would pop the high stakes reliability
bubble. Everyone would see that the high
stakes emperor is naked.
Should we know how well students are learning? Absolutely.
Should we knew how much they have learned? Absolutely.
Should we use one day in the spring of any given school year to attempt
to measure those attributes for the entire year? No way.
Teachers know day in a day out which kids are getting it and which kids
are not. Teachers develop an array of
strategies to help those students who do not get it the first go-around to get
it by the second, or third or fourth go-around.
But each go-around occurs in a short time loop. We cannot wait until the spring to discover
who has learned and who has not. We must
know before we move on. Challenging what
we know to be true in October has no meaning in May.
It is the first week in April, 2016. Please make a list of all the Christmas
presents you received on December 25th, 2015 and who gave those
presents to you. What, you have not
learned to value Christmas and the tradition of giving? You are a failure and may not experience
Christmas in 2016. Welcome to the notion
of high stakes testing. Ludicrous.
I believe that semester cumulative final exams are pushing
the memory span for knowledge retainment.
How long must I know the periodic table?
For the test next week? That’s
OK. For the 6weeks test? Maybe, but why test if I have proved I knew
it the week after I learned it? For a
final exam at the semester break? Too
long, besides I have already proven I know it.
How about a test in May based on what I learned in September? And, if I cannot repeat my performance from
September I hurt myself, my teacher, my school and my district. One cannot support such high stakes tests and
in any way claim to have legitimate school improvement at heart, much less have
legitimate caring for student learning.
And this concern does not in any way address all the other
concerns about what is tested and how, and the reliability of the tests. The state cannot even decide if the tests are
norm-referenced or criterion referenced because rather than being an
educational issue it is a political issue beyond the kin of legislators.
So many voices have raised the same concerns, and yet we
continue to elect representatives who have swallowed the testing Kool Aid. If every educator in Texas stood up and said
these tests are nonsense. We are hurting
kids, not helping them. We are hurting
teachers, not helping them. We are
hurting schools and school districts, not helping them. If every one of us took this notion to the
polls we could dramatically change the election outcome and thereby stop measuring
student outcomes in this way. I am so
glad no one is asking me to prove today that I learned Morse Code in
yesteryear. Dit, dash, duh.
Perhaps a total non sequitur but because it is so fun, a
clip of Bill Pulman playing President Tom Whitmore speaking to the pilots in “Independence
Day” can be seen here:
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