We don’t know how well teaching to the test works. We cannot measure the costs and benefits from a test-focused curriculum because we cannot know the results that alternative strategies might have provided. How would our students have tested if we had provided a more general, student-focused education for them? Teaching to the test removes the focus from students, and puts that focus on a measurement instrument instead.

For as much time and effort as we are now putting into testing, we don’t know how the results of those teaching efforts compare to past years in which the curriculum was determined by districts based on what leaders thought students needed to know for their future, rather than what students needed to know for the annual state test. Thanks to the Common Core Initiative, we may never be able to even approximate that data.

The new PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests, along with other state tests that are being rewritten to match the Common Core, ensure that we cannot compare today’s apples to yesterday’s apples. How are today’s students doing compared to students from the past? With the new tests, it’s impossible to say because students are taking significantly different tests. They are also taking those tests differently in many cases, as computers replace paper and pencil. For analysis purposes, these changes in testing instruments effectively damage or even destroy the ability to make comparisons over time.

If a million students took a test in 1975, and a million students took the same or a very similar test in 2005, we could comb our data (assuming we had saved enough of that data) to compare educational results for 1975 and 2005. We could say that Nebraska’s students had answered 67% of a section’s math questions correctly in 1975 and only 52% in 2005. (I made those numbers up for purposes of illustration.) When the same test is employed over time, results can be compared over time. Questions that were changed during that time period can be eliminated from analysis as long as the remaining questions make up a large enough sample to use for comparison.

Once those students started taking the PARCC test instead, the ability to make useful comparisons over time became vastly more complex. We don’t have apples to apples now, we have apples to watermelons or even shellfish. With the new emphasis on critical thinking and scenario-based problems, we may have shifted to testing different student attributes as well as different test content.

If we wanted to examine the effectiveness of teaching to state tests, we could go back and look at NCLB numbers for this purpose, numbers that provide slightly over a decade’s slice of teaching to identical or very similar tests* — once we queried school administrators to select those districts that actually adapted instruction to teach to that state test. For comparison purposes, though, we have another set of probably insurmountable problems: Many of America’s strongest districts never changed to that test-based strategy. They continued with their older curricula which had always worked well. Their students continued to receive broad-based instruction based on what administrators believed those students needed to be prepared for the world, instruction with a long-term rather than short-term view.

Other considerations need to be factored in as well. Different schools’ effectiveness at teaching to annual state tests will vary enormously, depending both on how well the teacher and district anticipate and focus on test content, and on how close the testing students’ level of academic understanding reflects the content of the test. Teaching to the test has always been a matter of degree, with some district’s even cheating to find out test content, while others merely chose topics to teach based on that content.

Individual student achievement levels are often ignored in discussions of teaching to the test, but my experience tells me those levels may be vitally important to the big picture. If I teach the content of an eighth grade test to two students, one operating at an eighth-grade level and the other at a third-grade level, I will have prepared the first student, but I may not have done much for the second student, who probably understood little of the material I was presenting. Even with lengthy before-school and after-school tutoring, my lower student may simply be too far behind to get ready for a test set five years above his or her academic operating level. (In the meantime, while I was desperately tutoring that lower student, what other learning opportunities did other students miss?) The net effect of what I just described will be that a district with students near grade level may gain significant points in the test-score game, while a district with students performing much below grade level may sacrifice useful instructional time to a goal that cannot be reached. In the first case, teaching to the test “worked.” In the second, inappropriate instruction may even have prevented learning from taking place.

*A few states changed their tests during these years to make attaining NCLB targets easier. Teasing out valid comparisons over time in these states will be challenging. That was the whole idea behind changing the tests, of course.

Today was cleaning day. Beds moved, plants got repotted and papers were taken out to be sorted and arranged. I stumbled on an opening activity from a few years ago while culling the boxes. I am going to share these papers for a few days. They are fun. They also document the fact that children are not adults, something politicians and educational leaders too often forget.

When I Become School Principal

When I become the school’s principal I would get better lunch. I would get better sports equipment for gym. I would get the bathrooms cleaner. I would let every student have five minutes of free time in class. I’ll get vending machines in the school, but the students must eat or drink whatever they got at lunch. I would increase the amount of passing time between periods to 4 minutes. If possible, at the end of the school year I would take the eighth graders to a big camping field trip for three days. I would also have a field day for the whole school. This is what I would do when I become the school’s principal.

I remember this boy well, in part because his parents pulled him out of school for nearly two months to go back to Puerto Rico, where he did not go to school. He was exceptionally quick to pick up new material, though, so he survived academically, despite that long absence, just as he survived the drama of the glasses. For months, the nurse and I kept trying to get him eyeglasses. I was calling and the nurse was even sending letters home, since the kid was every bit as blind as that proverbial bat. I sat him in the front row, but he still had to copy from the boy next to him. Wacky side benefit: The boy next to him knew this boy could not see the board from the front row and took exceptionally good notes in this one class, because he knew those notes mattered. Kids rise to the occasion when given responsibility. They also take care of each other.

Memories. I watched my student copying from other students and said nothing. Sometimes a kid’s gotta do what a kid’s gotta do. He finally got corrective lenses toward the end of the year.*

I like the idea of finishing school with a three-day, camping field trip. I’ll chaperone any time.

*Best guess as to what was going on with those glasses. Dad had a phone that said, “This phone does not accept incoming calls.” He could never be reached, although I know he was there. His kids talked about him. Mom seemed like the nicest, most caring parent in the world. I’d say that the family had no money and dad would not take advantage of social programs. Those programs will provide one pair of glasses per year, but you have to go on the grid to get those free glasses.

Sometimes, despite best efforts by school districts, annual state test scores come in showing little or no improvement, no doubt in part because of unreadable books. Too often today, books are set years above actual average student reading levels because those books address the Common Core questions expected to be found on the state annual test. No Child Left Behind laid the groundwork for this problem, but the fact that NCLB is no longer technically in operation* has left a legacy that still impacts America’s schools.

Under No Child Left Behind, that lack of improvement  spelled trouble and then progressively deeper trouble for district and school administrators who could not hit targets. Repeated failures led to government sanctions up to and including governmental takeover of a school district. While the axe poised over our many failing school districts seldom fell, NCLB gave states the right to bring down that axe, after first sending consultants to help prepare remediation plans.

A few years back, I watched as the state of Illinois fired my district’s local school board and took over district management. Before the takeover, I had spent two years working on my school’s Building Leadership Team, a committee preparing remediation plans. We filled fat binders. Then we redid the plan in a new computer-based system called Rising Star. Afternoon after afternoon, whole days out for conferences later, we had created a plan that required manpower and funds which did not exist, but which met the approval of consultants who did not have to ensure the plan’s implementation.

Districts with scores at subterranean levels have been locked into required assemblies, forming multiple committees to solve the problem of resistant test scores. Especially in financially disadvantaged districts, resources have commonly been redeployed since money to add new resources can seldom be found. Ironically, time and money have often been stolen from instruction or actual class preparation as everyone went to more meetings.

Not only did the NCLB process lead to sometimes dubious uses of resources, the reasoning behind these frantic efforts was faulty. Districts were responding to a real government threat – but a threat based in a fundamental misconception. Under NCLB, scores were supposed to march steadily upward. But scores cannot always march steadily upward. In fact, scores SHOULD not march steadily upward. For example, a school that has added 25% more English language learners over a decade will be doing extremely well to hold scores steady. Rapidly rising poverty and/or mobility rates in a district also sink scores, absent interventions for which there may be little time and less money.

Test scores are neither the problem nor the solution in district’s with rapidly changing student bodies. They are merely indicators. Rather than indicating a need for “better teachers,” I submit that what these scores actually indicate is a need for a more effective war on poverty, combined with a recognition that immigration patterns may create falling scores that are nobody’s “fault.”

*Under NCLB, the year when all students were supposed to be at grade level came and went in 2014. While government leaders made a big deal about the end of NCLB, the truth was that NCLB had already ended in abysmal failure.