A Washington Post blog has an interesting story about a very successful businessman and school board member who took a standardized test meant for 10th graders in his district. He failed the math section and got a D on reading. Now, this guy knows how to read, and he knows numbers decently well. But he can’t pass a 10th grade math test, prompting him to wonder “What’s wrong with the test?” (His well-educated friends didn’t know many answers when he asked around, wondering if it was just mental atrophy.)
There are lots of stories about standardized testing, and I don’t want to just rehash old news or drone on and provide commentary you can easily get elsewhere from a much snazzier website. But there is one thing I want to add:
While we’re having a discussion about the tests students are required to take, and how applicable to their lives the material will be, can we also have a discussion about the tests we make TEACHERS take? Because I think those are ridiculous too. And I have anecdotes to support my point too!
Anecdote the First
At one point my brother wanted to be a middle school math teacher. He enrolled in a program only to find that in order to teach geometry and pre-algebra, he was also required to know more math than I need for my PhD in Public Policy. Complex proofs, abstract algebra, linear algebra, calculus and more. Meanwhile, the communications skills required were laughably small. I’d want my children to be taught the quadratic formula by a teacher who’s great at communicating concepts and helping students with problems. I don’t particularly care whether or not that teacher can calculate an eigenvector by hand.
Anecdote the Second
Out of curiosity, I recently took a practice test to see how easy it would be to become certified as a social studies teacher in Pennsylvania (I took a scaled down version of a Praxis test). I wound up doing well enough to pass (had it been real), but I failed the economics section. I found this particularly interesting, because that’s the only part of a social studies curriculum which I”m even remotely qualified to teach. I haven’t taken an American or European history class since I was in high school myself, and I wasn’t even in the honors section. But I have a BS in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and I’ve done quite well in PhD level courses in economics and econometrics (at an institution which is also no slouch when it comes to academic rigor). I’ve even given economics seminars to high school students before.
The questions I missed had nothing to do with concepts, but included obscure vocabulary that was clearly out of some stylized curriculum. Knowing about economics didn’t help at all; memorizing a lot of definitions would have. There was very little that tested for any kind of understanding, and the ability to apply concepts was clearly not a priority.
Quantitatively fluent adults can’t pass 10th grade math tests. That’s a problem. But while we’re talking about tests, can we also talk about the ones that teachers take? And the way we teach people to make tests? Let’s have the whole conversation.