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Imagine that you are hiring a new English teacher. None of the people who apply have any of the qualifications to teach English. No teaching degree. No English degree. No experience in the classroom. Would you hire any of them? Probably not. Now here is the irony. Many of the people making curricular and legislative decisions about education don’t have the qualifications to be hired within education. This is a problem. In this episode, we hear how standardization, high-stakes testing, and policy decisions made by non-educators may be contributing to teachers’ decisions to leave education. Music: Theme Song By Julian Saporiti “So Stark (You’re a Skyscraper” by Matt LeGroulx is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA license. “Cat and Mouse” by Scott Holmes Music is licensed under a CC BY license. “Space (Outro)” by Andy Cohen is licensed under a CC BY license. “Home Fire” by Nul Tiel Records is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA license. “Press Conference” by Blanket Music is licensed under a CC BY-NC license. “Things Change” by HoliznaCC0 is in the Public Domain. “Living Life” by Scott Holmes Music is licensed under a CC BY-NC license. “Boulevard St Germain” by Jahzzar is licensed under a CC BY-SA license. “Hungaria” by Latche Swing is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA license. “Business Getaway ” by Scott Holmes Music is licensed under a CC BY license. Transcript: I used to listen to the Dixie Chicks’s song “Wide Open Spaces” before wrestling matches because I would get too wound up. It helped me slow down my breathing and relax. In junior high and high school, I was fixated on winning and losing. I’d get a pit in my stomach, psyche myself up and out, all to my detriment. I was terrified of failing, of being a disappointment or an embarrassment. Then I went to college. I walked-on to the University of Wyoming’s wrestling team. During my meeting with Steve Suder, the head coach, he told me, “You know, you’ll be walking into a room with a bunch of state champs. Are you worried about that?” I told him, “No, I’m not” because those were the guys that I wanted to be wrestling against. I was a two-time state placer and I had nothing to lose. Suder said, “Good,” and then told me that he never won state either, but he ended up being an All-American for the University of Wyoming, so there was hope for me. During our conversation, in between adjusting this chewed up yellow cushion he used as a back support, he told me that I was like the pretty girl’s funny friend at a party. I’m not someone he noticed right off the bat, but once he got to know me, he was happy to have me around. He meant this in the best way possible, and I didn’t mind. I made the team, worked my butt off, won some matches, and lost more than I won. And I hate losing, but it felt different. I was excited to be wrestling, not nervous. Suder made it clear that his expectations were low, but he was happy to have me. I focused on gaining experience and the process and growing as a wrestler and a person. And I got to wrestle a guy named Brent Metcalf, who is the only person I wrestled that had a documentary made about him. When someone asked Metcalf why he didn’t celebrate wins, he said, “I don't want to give my opponent the satisfaction of watching me celebrate, which would make it look like a big deal that I beat him.” This dude is a monster. It was an extraordinarily humbling match. I had no control of my own body - his fingers were in my mouth at one point, but I learned what it was like to wrestle the best. It was eye-opening. My tenure as a collegiate wrestler only lasted that year,but I remained in contact with Coach Suder off and on until his passing in 2019. And I had changed. My priorities shifted from valuing product to process. When I became an assistant high school wrestling coach, the head coach had also wrestled for Coach Suder, and so we continued his tradition of emphasizing process. And what I noticed is that the wrestlers felt less pressure. They only tried being better today than they were yesterday. And when they have that mindset, success, though not guaranteed, is more likely. They are wrestling to compete and to score points. And even if they don’t have success, they do the best they can do at that moment, and that’s always worth being proud of. In education, we focus on the product, on assessment. There is an obsession with passing or failing and we seem to have forgotten the value of process, which is where many teachers live. So today, we are going to look at how a structure of education that values standardized assessments could be contributing to teachers deciding to leave the profession, and because some of the frustrations with standardized assessment is a federal issue, which is too much to address here, we’ll explore a possible solution to the high stakes assessment issue in Wyoming, which would hopefully keep teachers in education. This is Those Who Can’t Teach Anymore, a 7-part podcast series exploring why teachers are leaving education and what can be done to stop the exodus. I’m Charles Fournier. Here is part 5: “Education has a Tourist Problem” Mark Perkins: I do think that for a lot of teachers who are leaving, and this is speculative, but I think it's reasonable to assume that if you alleviated some of the assessment requirements within their schools, their satisfaction would increase. I don't think that that's a jump. This is Mark Perkins, he is an Assistant Professor of Education Research Methods at the University of Wyoming and he is talking about the survey results he gathered about teacher attrition in Wyoming. So many teachers, both teachers leaving and teachers staying, reported that they were not happy with assessments. As we’ve heard from teachers that left teaching, there wasn’t one thing that pushed them out of teaching. It was the layering of factors. And if we want to keep more teachers from leaving, it would be worth trying to address some of the most consistent factors. Aside from overall well-being and feeling supported, assessment is one the most consistent teacher frustrations. Now before we get into what specifically teachers don’t like about assessment, I think it’s important to think about why education currently has assessments, and this goes back to what we talked about last episode: the purpose of education and needing to be able to measure success for whatever that purpose is. Simply put, we need to reflect on what we want kids to know and how we can measure what they know. Mark explains. Mark Perkins: And so what does school success really look like? That sounds like an interesting, easy question. It's like, Well, kids know how to do math. Well, okay. What does that look like? Well, they can add, subtract, divide. All right. So what? When you start drilling into the actual requirements to exist and inhabit the world, the factors become much more latent than what we measure. But we fixated ourselves purely on content. During our conversation, Mark explained that there are a ton of other things that we want for students: self-awareness, identity development, civic consciousness, the ability to have some gumption and as Mark phrased it, drag a horse through the mud. But none of those qualities are easy to measure, which means it’s more difficult to measure a teacher’s overall effectiveness. This brings us back to the focus on content. Mark Perkins: But all of the focus has been on reading math, science and somewhat government. How does a teacher who navigates let's call it the multivariate universe of being an educator. How do you evaluate teaching for the holistic aspects of the job? While we don't? It would be difficult to assess students and teachers in the Multivariate Universe of education, as Mark puts it, so we assess a few content areas, and only a few things in those content areas. Many mission statements want to acknowledge the whole student, but we only assess a fraction of the student. For example, I have a grant application unit for my sophomores. They do research and write a grant to receive hypothetical funding that they can use to address a real problem within our community. I don’t limit students on what kinds of problems they want to address, so students have looked at drug use or homelessness or access to sports or social justice issues. When students submit their grant applications, we go through a selection process. Students read each other's grants anonymously and identify ones that meet all of the grant requirements and would, in their minds, best serve our community. By the end of the process, all of my classes vote on the one grant that should receive the hypothetical funding. Every year I’ve done this, the grants that make the final vote, the ones that all of my students have pushed forward, are philanthropic and genuinely kind. And I tell my students this, usually as I tear up, that this project gives me hope for the future because through their research, writing, discussions, and voting, they prove that they are empathetic humans. I learn much more about what my students can do through this project than any standardized assessment that I’ve been required to administer. And this is a frustration echoed by teacher after teacher. If the thing that is used to reflect a district’s success is a bubble-sheet test, that can feel pretty disheartening. Because from the teachers’ perspective, the results of those tests, the results that are reported in the paper and raise community questions like, “What are they even teaching kids in school?” those tests lack validity. They’re not the best way to measure whether the kids are alright, and Mark has questions about how well these tests show what kids know and how well they predict the future success of students, which is often how standardized tests are used. Several teachers pointed to the frustration that rather than getting students ready for life beyond high school or to be a life-long learner, they are forced to think that the be-all-end-all was the ACT or SAT. So engaging and authentic instruction gets replaced with teaching to a test. From Mark’s research and work in assessment, he sees that those assessments might not be worth the time we are putting towards them. Mark Perkins: And I have a suspicion that the predictive validity of these tests is not that good. And my suspicion comes from a very large body of literature that has looked at ACT/SAT versus high school grade point average and college level English math and general college grade point average. And yet, we invest an amount of time, pressure and money on these measures. What this means is that a grade point average, though imperfect in its own right, is a better predictor of future student success, whether they are college or career bound, than a standardized assessment. So what a teacher measures in their classroom is a better indicator of future success than what a standardized assessment shows. And if this isn’t enough, the amount students are tested is tremendous. This saps their energy and the energy of teachers who have to say, “I know this is the 573rd test, but you’ve got this.” Mark Perkins: We need to simplify and make assessment parsimonious. We do need to assess, but we certainly only need to take our temperature one time and evening, maybe two, when we have a cold because we know that it's going to say the same number every time. Measuring is not teaching. I want to reiterate what Mark just said - measuring is not teaching. I also want to clarify something about assessment. Teachers use informal assessments all of the time. And these are different than the high-stakes standardized assessments. Good teaching makes use of valid and authentic assessments often. When I was writing this episode, I got talking with my wife, Jennie, about assessment, because this is what you do when you marry another teacher. When she taught Advanced Biology, she created these elaborate group tests that students would get excited about. She used assessment as a learning tool. Her thought is that you don’t know what you know until you need to apply your knowledge. This is why I like the writing process because it's an act of creating and synthesizing. It’s a great form of learning. So the right assessment can be an informative learning tool, but the high stakes, fill-in-the-bubble, standardized assessments that teachers are frustrated with are not that. Mark explains that in order for those standardized assessments to be more valid, there should be some adjustments. Mark Perkins: I think that we could more wisely use measurement, and education. I think one of the first problems with high stakes testing, is the fact that the majority of these tests have no impact on students. Now. You don't have to be draconian about it .But we make intelligent decisions based off of test scores. And we provide students with logical and rational incentives. From the teacher’s perspective, it’s hard to convince students that the tests matter because students don’t see how they are relevant to their lives. I try to give students some perspective before tests, like “No it doesn’t impact your grade, but if you go through and randomly click answers to finish early, the people who care about these tests will think you’re not learning anything, and then they will change curriculum and make you guys only learn from a textbook. Do you want that?” They usually shake their heads no, but that doesn’t mean they care any more about the test. Many teachers struggle to care about the tests as well. They don’t like the kind of standardization the tests force that does not allow for freedom in the classroom. Shane Atkinson, who we heard from in the first episode, left teaching after 13 years, and part of his decision to leave had to do with a lack of autonomy, some of which is tied to standardization. He pointed out that there are some districts that are so standardized, their days are mapped out in a binder. Shane Atkinson: This is what you do, then you do this, here's the question you should ask, have them fill out this worksheet. Day two… I think that's been done under the guise of equity. You don't want a kid in this classroom at this school to get a much different or better education than a teacher in the classroom next door. And I get that. So the idea is, well, to keep it equitable, they should be doing the same thing in both of those classrooms during that period of their US History class. Again, you're making decisions based on a minority and applying them to everybody, even if you're doing good work. That does everybody a disservice. The hope is that every kid will receive the same quality of education, so teachers are expected to stick to a curriculum, and in some instances, stick to a script. Much of the push towards national standardization came from the George W Bush Administration’s, 2001, No Child Left Behind Act. Jaye Wacker, whose voice we heard in the first episode and who quit teaching after 31 years, felt like the No Child Left Behind Act did a lot to undermine public trust in education. And it did it through standards. Jaye Wacker: No Child Left Behind set impossible targets. And basically year after year after year, it undermined public confidence in education. So then we needed the standards we needed to prove that we're doing something and yeah, I get it and I agree with it. You know, let's prove what we're doing. But this homogenization that we've talked about _____ High School in their curriculum, the most diverse curriculum in the state, and their kids are outperforming all these homogenized curriculums. Part of the impossible targets from the No Child Left Behind Act included a 100% proficiency rate for all students by 2014 - this meant that all students would be able to perform at grade level by 2014. This sounds nice, it is great rhetoric because of course no one wants to leave any kid…
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