Pass the salt.

So I can rub it into my wounds.

Or, more accurately, rub it into the wounds of my students, since that's what the test prep curriculum seems to be doing. 

I am beginning to get burnt out at work, since all I do is test prep. Even though this is what the students ask for (since their goal is to pass the GED; they don't really care if they attain knowledge. I cannot blame this for this, as their long-term goal is to find a job with a living wage, which they need a GED to get, and most of the information on the GED they do not really need to know to be successful in these jobs. I felt the same way in high school; I wanted to pass chemistry but knew I would never use what I had learned in that class.), it is really tedious and boring teaching it (and probably learning it).

What's more: If students don't pass the test the first time, it is incredibly difficult for me as an educator to help them improve for next time, which I touched upon in my last post, in which I stated that the GED Testing Service does not let the students see which questions they missed, only which skills they need to work on. (By the way, this is especially frustrating with the writing portion, in which I cannot see what the students wrote, only what their grade is, so I cannot tell them why they received the score they did. I am consistently baffled by students -- strong writers in my class -- who end up scoring a zero on the writing section. I'm not just teaching these students "my way" of writing: I am using the writing curriculum published by the GED Testing Service.)

This blog post likens passing the bar to the test prep culture in public schools. That may seem like an obvious analogy, but the author makes a great point that her classes in law school far better prepared her for life as a lawyer than the bar exam did, stating that "ten years into private practice, I don’t draw on my two months of intensive bar test prep to advise my clients or manage my work.... My two months of bar test prep taught me that mass-produced bar prep can successfully raise scores: my MBE score skyrocketed when I left my inquisitiveness, curiosity, and thoughtfulness at the door, and instead immersed myself completely in the test-makers’ logic."

This is exactly what I tell my students: think like a test-maker. I hate doing this for the exact reason stated above: It severely limits their curiosity and thoughtfulness, which will serve them much better in the long run.

Furthermore, students who take the GED have different goals than many students in high school: Get a job. While many students in high school want this too, eventually, they also wish to pursue more education first, which is the population the GED is written for. (It is based on CCSS, which preps students for higher education. This is not a terrible goal, but it does not serve the particular population of students I work with.) 

Lecester Johnson, a brilliant woman who runs the adult education program at Academy of Hope (whom I have had the pleasure of meeting personally), speaks to this point in a PBS Newshour, against President of the GED Testing Service, Randy Trask. I urge you to read this transcript and see who has the purer motive for helping students succeed.

How is a raven like a writing desk?

Is it like modern education "reform," in that no one has seemed to come up with a reasonable answer?

This post is, surprise, about standardized testing (which you're probably sick of hearing about, but that's essentially all we hear about now when it comes to education policy, and I'm going to talk about it at length and hope others do too in the hopes that policy makers will finally get on board and realize it's. Not. Working.)

I read this poignant article yesterday that I thought summed things up very nicely: "[The standardized test] is a fundamentally flawed tool that will only debase the good work we teachers do in the classroom, the work that districts do in designing and implementing quality curriculum, and the work our students do in learning to become enlightened critical thinkers."

One of the author's main points here is that the secrecy surrounding standardized tests make it extremely difficult -- perhaps even impossible -- for teachers to accurately gauge which skills students still need to improve once the tests have been graded. It seems to her as if the testing services, Pearson in particular, care more about their own security (read: profit) than about students actually knowing the material.

She also mentions the fact there are bad test questions. For example: "How does the narrator's point of view contribute to the mood of the story?" I am an English teacher, and when I read this question, my first thought was, "Huh?" because that doesn't make any sense. The writer of this article concurs; as she states, an author does not use point of view to develop mood. When tests are written by psychometricians and not educators, how can the test developers be held accountable (*ahem* another magic word in education reform *ahem*) in creating legitimate questions that test real skills?

I have noticed both these problems on the GED exam, since this is what I teach. It is extremely frustrating on both ends -- student and teacher -- when a student fails the test the first time, and I can't help them improve. The reason I cannot do this is because, like the tests in the previous article, there is great secrecy surrounding the GED exam, which was also developed by Pearson.

For example, when a student finishes his or her exam, the computer generates a score. The student cannot see which questions he or she got incorrect. Therefore, a non-passing score could be a result of a few skipped questions, or an accidental marking of "C" when the student meant to click "B," or even a misspelling on a fill-in-the-blank, since the computer grading system has no nuance.

Moreover, the GED Testing Service (which as far as I can tell is not "accountable" to anyone) lists a set of skills for the student to work on for next time, but this is not very helpful to the student, or to me as an educator, because without seeing how the student missed the questions that pertained to the skills, the student's only option is to essentially regurgitate what he or she has already been studying. It's very possible a student has these skills down cold, but could have missed a question due to an unknown vocabulary word, or was reading too quickly, or legitimately does not know how to solve the problem. These are all things that are essential for educators to know in order to better serve their students.

When I give quizzes back, the students can see immediately not only which questions they got wrong, but why. I think understanding this premise is, in some ways, more important than getting a multiple choice question correct. Also, I give students a chance to correct any wrong answers, and while I do not change their quiz grade, their corrections give them another opportunity to think critically and understand their own thinking.

I could probably type for another hour here about my issues with the GED Testing Service, and really, all standardized tests that employ the same level of secrecy, but I won't. Instead, I'll let this article about the more rigorous GED do the talking for me. In this one, a point is made that testing companies have a monopoly and seem to care more about their own profit margin than about students succeeding. This is especially the case with adult education, I feel, since these adults have a) been out of school for so long and b) were exposed to bad education in the first place, especially if they grew up poor and urban (which mine did). These students can often not handle the higher rigor of the new GED. I'm not saying we should eliminate rigor, of course; I'm simply saying there has to be a better way.

Perhaps instead of privatizing standardized testing, we can have schools and districts be in charge of what students should know and how to measure their knowledge.