Education Issues & Trends

            The biggest issue facing educators today is the need to rethink the paradigm that forces students and teachers to be accountable for their progress by standardized tests that most stakeholders perceive as punitive rather than diagnostic.  It is important to understand that I, as an educator and as a parent, do not disagree with the need to assess students and monitor their progress.  Assessment and progress monitoring are the tools that teachers, doctors, auto mechanics – anyone who strives to find deficits and make improvements – must use in order to diagnose problems and implement solutions. The issue, rather, is the reality that the original diagnostic intention behind standardized testing has been turned upside-down so that teachers now enter into a career in which they are too often made to believe that the standardized test score is all and absolute, that if their students do not demonstrate standardized success, then they are failures.

            The result of this reversal of intention and reality has become a sometimes grim education system in which too many teachers trade out teaching the curriculum in favor of teaching the test.  This system leaves behind the entire notion of teaching the child, although that is exactly what we are called to do.  Instead of teaching children from their individual points of need to their highest potentials, many teachers train them to pass exams that will move them through the system to the next level but leave them unprepared for the realities of life and career.  This predicament has been growing for years, exemplified by poll after poll of business owners who complain constantly not only that graduates are ill-trained but that they often do not even possess the necessary skills to be adequately trained.  We must find a way, as educators, to end this cycle of defeat for children and for our communities.

            The solution to this situation must obviously be a multi-faceted one.  If there were a magic wand, someone would long ago have waved it.  The first step toward a solution, though, is pretty straight forward: Start teaching children, again. In its 2004 revision to the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, the United States Congress mandated that public education systems in America adopt a framework that would find children with learning deficits as early as possible, intervene at those children’s areas and points of need, and monitor their progress until they no longer operated at the previous deficit. These structures are called Response to Intervention (RtI) frameworks, and if we, across the nation, implement a genuine RtI paradigm in all of our schools – screening students in reading and math in first grade through twelfth, locating students who are operating below grade level, and giving those students the extra time and instruction they need in these fundamental areas – we will be well on our way to achieving a dream most of us share – that every child graduates high school with the ability to read and apply mathematical concepts to their lives.  The second step toward a solution is that public policy based on standardized test scores must be redrawn so that improvement from one year to the next reflects classroom success. From this perspective, the test becomes a diagnostic tool that informs future instruction. This would go a long way toward abolishing the perspective that these tests are punitive and could provide the relief that many teachers need to feel before they will be comfortable abandoning the “teach the test” model of teaching.  And finally, teachers must go back to the very correct philosophy that our jobs are not to teach content; our job is to teach children.

            Every teacher I know loves children and wants to help each one succeed.  This is not a far-fetched dream.  We need only to look at the picture from a different perspective to see the way to achieve it.