True learning, REAL learning, won't ever take place in schools in a systemic fashion until we get rid of standardized tests. They are a measure of inconsequential educational nice-to-knows but not need-to-knows, yet their results are held up and examined as if they were definitive, absolute measures of true understanding. What makes me lose touch with rationality is when the media and any politician using the "education angle" as a part of their re-election campaign talk about these test scores in terms of "learning" when, in reality, learning is the last thing you can draw valid conclusions about from these tests.
But you don't have to believe this crazy teacher if you don't want to. Just ask any sane teacher that is interested in having students learn, and they'll tell you standardized test results are useless as far as being able to decipher what students really know, understand, and are able to do.
They do not measure how much my students have learned to be able to learn independently and not rely on a teacher. They can't possibly measure how much they have improved on their collaboration skills. And they don't even come close to measuring how well my students can evaluate data and apply the science we learned in class to an original experiment that was of their own design.
In other words, they are worthless at measuring the things that really mean anything in terms of student progress.
After we get rid of standardized tests, lets get rid of standards, too. Sometimes they feel like an anchor to which I am chained, and they only serve to drag me down, deeper away from any real learning I could be teaching my students. In Illinois, we are given standards and told, "Teach them. Teach them all." Well, State of Illinois, it's impossible to teach standards that are so poorly written and contain such superfluous information that teachers first have to guess at what you even mean by them. Good teachers know that student learning should never be a guessing game; why are we as educators required to guess what will really be on the test? And, after we think we've successfully read the State of Illinois' mind, why do we always end up asking ourselves, "Who in the world thought it was important that they know this?"
For example, here's a standard I have come to know and loathe: "Answer questions about given Punnet squares." What type of Punnet squares, monohybrid or dihybrid? What questions do you want them to answer? Is it phenotypic and genotypic ratios that should be determined, or is it the probability of a certain genotype, or is it the percent of offspring showing a certain phenotype? Or is it all of the above? I have no idea because the State is making me play "guess what's on the test." It's a game at which I readily admit I am not very good.
And don't even get me started about the standard that succinctly and infuriatingly says, "Understand isotopes."
But the bigger question is this: who decided that all of these bits of information were important enough to know in the first place? Why am I even teaching some of the things that I do? Shouldn't I let my students (with me as a guide and caretaker) take their own learning directions, following their own compasses, on their own paths to learning? Sometimes what individual students need isn't on the big list of ambiguous "learning" standards that are plopped in front of me every year. Each year I find myself more and more resentful at having my students' learning defined by and confined to a few pages of standards.
I have real teaching to do in order to start some real learning; I don't have time to waste playing the state's games with my students' understanding.
I know some of you out there now fully understand why the word "crazy" is in the title of this blog. Yes, I'm advocating getting rid of standardized testing and the standards they rode in on. It's time we faced the fact that you can't standardize human beings or their learning; there's too much variation in the population in order to even attempt to do that. Each learner has to come to their own understanding in their own way.
I tell my students all the time that they will not be allowed to take shorcuts to learning. Well, this whole system of standards and standardized testing is one big shortcut, designed to make something that's hard to measure easy to measure. It's a shortcut that has led us nowhere.
We can come up with a better way to hold schools accountable for learning. It will be complicated. It will not produce a single number used to rank and compare students.
It will be messy, because learning is messy. But it will be worth it.