I'd like to start this blog off with a very prominent and dominating issue. Testing and accountability often echoes in the halls of high school. Teachers rant about it, yet the seemingly do nothing to stop the oncoming storm. It all started when people probably witnessed bad teachers passing students to get them out of high school, when students were supposedly not up to the task of learning in college and being a good businessperson. Somehow, students were lagging behind, mainly minorities I've been told. In order to balance this horrific crime, my home state, Texas initiated the TAKS test. If students could not pass the test, they were to be held back I believe, or the teachers were held "accountable" for the students failure. Eventually when George W. Bush came to power, he instigated the No Child Left Behind Act which furthered the Testing and Accountability. One dark factor remains embedded within these tests. If schools fail to "preform", then the school will be held "accountable" for their failure. The school teachers who's students fail to "perform" will be expulsed from the school, the school will be put on probation, and the state will take control of the school and will somehow make things better. Because of this change in education reform, teachers have stopped teaching and instead teach to the test. Teachers jam students with test preps, PSAT tests, TAKS prep tests, "this what you need to know to past the test" tests. Teachers whose students don't perform admirably in general could result in the teacher's expulsion. The school could lose funding if the students fail to "preform" well to the state's standards. The worse case scenario is that the school will be shut down, and students will have to crowd up the closest school. The poorest schools that need the most help, will stay poor and possibly cease to exist.
As you can already see, I'm greatly opposed to government testing. What shocks me more is that republicans, who always gloat about less government, want to regulate what we learn. Schools that desperately need funding, start cheating. The cheating levels even reach teachers who fear the loss of their job. It has turned into a self preservation rather than actual teaching. Teachers start passing F students so that they can keep their job. We have begun to let students who are unworthy of passing, pass. Teachers become lax in their grading and teaching, and the colleges, and even eventually the rest of the economy, pay the price for it. Because teachers "teach to the test" they do not actually teach students the actual value of learning. What they instead do, is fill our minds with pointless info that we will soon forget, because we are too busy trying to make the teachers pay for keeping us locked up in a classroom prison. English teachers do not teach us how to truly analyze literature, science teachers can only teach what is required by the state, and nothing more advanced than what the state requires. We truly learn nothing in English, we only learn some good chemistry and physics. Maybe if we're lucky, we'll have a good history teacher. But the subject of English is at the tests' most scrutiny. How can I prove this? I was there in ninth grade when we spent half of the school year studying how to take the tax tests from a very terrible English teacher. We used practice TAKS tests, and barely learned anything substantial that the class of English should have taught. In English II, the subject was indeed subjected to the same scrutiny, and all the way to the third year English class and probably to the fourth, albeit not as much.
Eventually, the lack of education travels all the way up to the community colleges and universities and now community colleges are being subject to the same abuse. I know this because of my Acting professor, my English professors, and my Geology professor. During this past year, the professors have had to undergo program review in order to prove that their college was still an accredited college. I found this horrific. One of my English professors, to whose name I will not mention to protect her identity, confessed that sometimes she would grade an F paper a C paper. Even the college professors now risk losing their job because if their students. Who knows how soon this will travel up to the university level full and through. Basically this program review is basically a war between the administration of the college and the faculty of the college. I want to bring this up because administration acts like the all seeing power, much like the states and the federal government.
This is the interesting part of my little argument. In one instance the administration basically decides whether the college professors deserve to keep their job or not. And what does the administration know of the subjects taught at college. Did these people major in Geology and English? Did these people major in Biology and Theater? Do they know how English should be taught? Do they know how theater arts is part of our culture? No. They do not know. All they see as far as I can tell, are numbers and data points. They have no emotion nor understanding of how English or History should be taught if they themselves do not teach the subject! So how can they judge whether someone is doing their job right when they themselves only do administrative work? For that matter, how can a state government judge whether a school is doing their job right? How can they judge what students need to know, when they themselves are not teachers and sit upon ivory towers in capital buildings lounging about proclaiming they know what people need to know, yet do not ask the teachers and students what problems arise in the schools? How can they declare that if students are absent then the schools get no money, when the schools that need money are the ones with the most attendance problems? How can they sit idly by and let their seeds of destruction further harm the children of the earth? These administrators, politicians and businessmen alike have committed false improvements when they themselves do not know what it is to be a student who has a desire to obtain knowledge.
The reason I say businessmen is because they too, not all but many, are part of the problem. Many of these businessmen rant and rave that colleges and High schools need be accountable for the disaster of supposedly untrained students. Workers apparently write horribly and therefore it must be the college and High school's fault. These English teachers must not be teaching right. They must be held accountable for their heinous crimes against our businesses. Therefore the state implements these measures and decides that this how students need to be taught, and what they must learn. If you ask me, it has dumbed down our education to where I bring up the same old saying, "Teaching to the test"
Indeed because of Testing and Accountability, the amount of knowledge required has become a minimal lowland. We aren't challenged even though some things may be challenging. We are no longer being taught right, only to the test. What then are we learning? Are we learning applicable stuff? Supposedly we are. I know these tests are terrible because I have taken them. What's worst of all is that these tests are not timed. Students have all day to complete them. These tests in fact were so easy, you could fail them for carelessness. Their writing topics were so dry, a student could fail them not because they couldn't write, but because the topic bored them to death. And if electronics are grading how we students write, how do we know it actually judges a good writer. If businessmen say we cannot write, it is because we spend more time preparing for tests, taking multiple choice tests, memorizing literary terms and not applying them, and barely any writing. In all my English career in high school we read one book and watched power points of other stories that we barely even read, we wrote maybe one or two papers, and we had other peers check our writing. How reliable is that? How can be better writers if all we do is take tests, barely read anything, and barely write anything? How can we be prepared in college if everything is an easy breeze and not actually the true stuff we need to fully know?
I mention English because it is my favorite subject, and it also happens to be the one scrutinized the most. We take more TAKS prep tests in English than in any other subject. In fact, as far as I can remember, we didn't take any TAKS prep tests in any other subject. But I do have a couple of things to work out with in the other subjects, just not in this topic.
Now what about accountability. Well in a way, I've already talked about it. Teachers can lose their jobs if all their students fail. But I do want to get into that subject more. Let me give everyone an example to play with. What if a school has a really good teacher. The teacher teaches the material at an excellent level, the teacher challenges his or her students, the teacher's students passes all of her tests, but the teacher's students fail to pass the government test. Well something must be wrong with the teacher, if he or she can't get her students to pass a very dull and poorly written government test. This teacher must have fiddled with the student's grades. Fire her at once! So much for that good teacher. Now the students in the next year could possibly have a very bad teacher. This bad teacher might focus extensively on the government tests and somehow miraculously get students the to pass his or her class and the government test and therefore will still be a teacher, even though he or she is a terrible yet clever teacher. On the college level, what if a college professor teaches many students well, knows his or her subject area very well, but all the students fail the class. Quite possibly the professor will most likely be fired. I would bet that this has happened on more than one occasion. Several professors but many more teachers have probably lost their job to this logic or worse have had to pass their students so that their students look good, which in turn makes them look good. Therefore there are students being passed who do not deserve to be passed. But the professors lack the power to protect themselves from the black hand of expulsion.
Administrators and government officials automatically assume that the teacher is at fault for the students' failure, but has anyone ever considered that the student might actually be the problem? I have sat in classrooms for both high school and college. I must say that I'm not surprised teachers have trouble teaching students. I am terribly disappointed in the peers that sat around me. I am in fact ashamed to have even been in their ranks. These students mistreat and disrespect teachers, by disrupting the classroom all the time, by talking, by being rude, by texting during class. These high school teachers have to put up with very immature students who take learning as a joke. None of them wanted to learn, so they would cause problems. Now some teachers had better grasp of the classroom than others. Mainly the source of the problem I think, is that many teachers treat high schoolers like children in grade school. Think about it. They still hand out detentions for petty things such as dress code and failing to turn in tutorial cards. Students laugh at detentions, and I hear sometimes even try to dress it up. It's a medieval method of discipline, one that no longer works very well.
Students disrespect teachers at every corner, especially when teachers lack a strong dominant alpha personality. As proof, both my chemistry and physics teachers were like this. Nice and friendly they may have been, but both of them treated us like ten year olds. Even I felt like was being treated like a child even though I wasn't the one causing trouble. Their assignments I felt were meant for middle school children. Stuff like making models of atoms and stuff like that. Although that can be fun, that isn't how college science is taught. What was missing in my chemistry and physics classes were labs. The problem is that I went to a special school, so I have no idea how actual science classes are taught in regular high school. But I think I speak on the more general aspect that students have a lack of respect for teachers, many of them turning out to be duds. Teachers and even college professors pass these duds that are not ready and do not deserve to be passed all for fear of losing their job.
So I ask the administrators and politicians this? Why are teachers the only ones being held accountable. Should not students also be held accountable for their failure? Should not the student be given the slap in the face now, rather than being coddled by teachers and then receiving a severe slap in the face at college that can sometimes lead to suicide? Must this teachers are always at fault culture go on? How do we make accountability more fair to teachers and find the teachers that are terrible and not harm the students. How do we protect the teachers and also protect the students. How can we make students more accountable for their actions.
This is more of a cultural problem that I'm entering into my argument. I've seen it my entire life. It's called coddling. Teachers still baby students by giving them extensions for assignments or dumbing down the standards for students so that they can pass. But in college, college professors don't give a flying feather about the students. The students are responsible for maintain their grades, yet in all honesty this anti teacher culture has permeated even college. What makes students disrespect teachers by giving them a hard time, by texting during class, by talking out of terms, by not paying attention, by talking back to the teacher (I have witnessed this several times at my school and I always wanted to slap the student for doing that. They know it annoys the teacher, and they somehow know they can get away with it for a long time.) and just being plain rude. I think the culprit is narcissism. Students I think tend to believe in this day and age that the world revolves around them. This varies in degrees of extremity from student to student. Many students think high school is the time of their lives and that the future will be theirs. That attitude doesn't last and if it does the person typically has nothing in the future to gain. People are more interested in social groups and football (not all 100% true) rather than learning and knowledge. They have this attitude that creates disorder within the classroom. Eventually that attitude somewhat goes away in college, but not always. I have seen that kind of disrespect in a classroom. These duds will not listen to the teacher in class, they will try to get out of assignments, and they will try to ask or rather argue for an A when their work does not deserve and A. I fear it is because of another culture or rather capitalistic problem within our society.
It has gotten to the point where students are worried more about their grade than actually learning the material. The value of education loses its value when it becomes more about the grade. I see the psychology. It's basically stands like this: I want to be an Engineer right now, but I have to have a degree in it. I don't really want to study engineering. I just want a job to make money. I like making money and doing business, but not actually the science. I have to have a 3.5 GPA in all my Engineering classes. Okay...Hmm...I need an A in this class, but I have to do all this work. I really need an A if I'm going to get a job because everyone else is after it. Oh I need an A in English even though I think it's the worse subject in the world and it's not Engineering. I just need a passing grade so I can graduate and become an Engineer so I can become a wealthy American. This thought process pervades all fields. I used Engineering because my father witnessed this deplorable behavior when he was studying Engineering. Most people are like that. They just want the grade so they can get the certificate that gets them the job. The work ethic seems irrelevant in college and high school but only in the job market because that's where the money is. Therefore subjects like English, History, Art, and Theater, in other words many of the humanities and the arts, often get disrespect from students who don't want to take any of these courses. So what's the right alternative. Should students only take what they want to take because it's more applicable or should they be a well rounded person in their culture?
If you haven't guessed already, you probably know which side I'm going to take. I'm going to mainly take the side of the well rounded person and a little bit of the more applicable sided person. I see the benefits in both. On one hand courses should be formatted to applicability. On the other hand, if we are not well rounded in history, literature, and the arts, we are without our culture. We become isolated and machine like. We become too individual and not enough community. Although I value the individual's rights, I am not one without my theater and writing community. And corporate bureaucracy continues to smite the arts and humanities down because it isn't "applicable" Hence the accountability and testing act. I feel it is all scheme to reduce us to a mechanical corporate world, where people are numbers instead of human beings with emotion. This is a bit of bias on my part, but I find strong validity in my statement and therefore I stand strong with my rash statement. What do businessmen know of the arts unless they love art and theater? What do they know of writing when they never appreciated literature in their life? Who do they think they are to tell others how English should be taught when they themselves never majored in it? What do they know of enlightenment? All they care about is making money(not all but many). There are indeed some who love the arts, but they have the gall to say the arts are not applicable to the job market, that reading is a waste of time, that history is unimportant to the job market, that philosophy has no bearing in work ethics. Do they think they can do a better job of teaching people how to write than English professors who play with literature every day, where as they play with words only in formal texts and numbers. Do they really know what it means to write? If they think English teachers can't do their job, than they should teach it themselves and leave the school systems alone since they do a good job of scrutinizing our passions.
I fear that we may be in a culture decline if this continues. If we become machines than the Chinese have already won the economic war. This country will indeed fall. We will lose what it means to love books, to love theater, to love learning. These tests were designed I believe to turn us into machines. Believe me, I wanted to rebel. I wanted to take my TAKS test and burn it in the fires of Tartarus and unfurl my wings into the heavens of knowledge and say, I will not be treated like a machine. I will learn because I want to know. So if you don't see my argument already let me proclaim it at the top of my lungs.
Get rid of government testing. It dumbs down the standards of education, and gives student false illusions that college will be this easy. They will learn to hate learning. They will learn to not be a well rounded person. They will lose their culture and will be sucked into the black hole of the corporate capitalistic job market. They will never learn to respond to emotion. They will never love the arts, and if books and art cease to exist, eventually I'll bet creative movies will cease to exist.
I say this as if doomsday were approaching. In one sense the situation isn't that bad, but it could get worse. I say this because I have to at least show you what I have seen. I will admit I am biased to corporate business because I am an artist. I'm a writer and an actor. I don't do it for money. I do acting and writing because I have to. If I don't, I damage myself internally. I have to write and act and learn. It's in my nature. It's instinct and drive. Give students a chance to find their drive rather than burden them with pointless tests that only hold them back. Give them a chance to be human and make mistakes before these mistakes really bite them in the back. Maybe then we might become a better nation, economically and culturally.
Starvix Draxon
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