Ms. K sits at her old, wooden desk. It's 7 pm. Her head is almost hidden behind piles of paper stacked like bricks in a white wall in front of her. Tonight she is looking at math papers, an assessment of her students' progress. Her desk is covered with test forms, answer documents, and a spreadsheet that summarizes the students' scores. She puts her fingers next to a couple of names, notices the column marked "at risk." She knows she will have to explain their poor performance to expert evaluators, they missed two out of three questions, and she will have to document what remedial action she plans to take. These things would be reasonable if she was teaching applied mathematics at MIT. Ms. K teaches kindergarten.
When I first began teaching twenty years ago, this is not what I imagined at all. I thought five year olds were supposed to spend their time learning about the world and each other. I pictured colored blocks and sand tables, small plastic animals and beans for counting, a tiny kitchen for creative play, books and beanbags and storytelling and writing and playacting. All designed to help young children be active learners and practice getting along with others. But this isn't part of our corporate education model. Ms. K doesn't have as much time for these things anymore. She is now required to test twenty-four children every three weeks to see if they're moving fast enough in math. This involves copying the tests, helping children understand how to fill in a bubble for their answers, and showing them the difference between top and bottom, left and right. For some, this can take the whole school year. When I ask to see the documents, she shows me a file folder an inch thick filled with formalized, computer-generated pages. These come from the data she inputs into a hand held device. She is also required to collect data from reading assessments, adjust reading groups daily, and prepare for the standardized tests administered every January.
Another set of math assessments is done three times a year. Ms. K sits with each child for twenty to thirty minutes and orally asks a series of questions on a variety of math concepts. She writes down their answers and tracks the data. She also has to manage the remaining twenty-three five year olds who have an attention span of approximately ten minutes. At thirty minutes per child and twenty-four children, this set of assessments takes twelve hours, two hours a day for six days. When does teaching actually happen? Data collection begins in September.
Administrators also look at the computer pages to evaluate and analyze the numbers. Recently someone in the central administration decided the school's growth in math was not high enough. So they sent a math coach to observe the teachers, find the problem, and set the standard for academic rigor. Ms. K was coached on what words she needed to use as she taught. The coach whispered to her, in the middle of a lesson, "Now say 'how many are in each group?' Then ask, 'how would you read that graph?' " Ms. K is a thirty-five year early childhood, award winning veteran teacher. She is an expert at teaching, speaking, and listening to children. But she is being retrained for teaching from a script, where everyone's words are the same. This is a school that has been high performing on both state and standardized tests for years. Teachers had time to facilitate creativity, deep learning, critical thinking, and imagination. Why does a school that's working need more data?
Because current thinking about school reform insists that data is the answer, that data tells the whole story about how children learn, that uniform assessments and tests are the best way to insure that teachers are effective and that schools are performing. This is an example of how schools are being run like corporations: identify the objectives and goals, accumulate data to assess achievement of those goals, and analyze the results. I am afraid for our future.
What's missing is understanding that children learn in unique ways, at their own pace, which is not always measurable at any given moment in time. If a child has difficulty with adding numbers in kindergarten, it doesn't mean they won't be able to do so by first grade. It doesn't mean they are at risk of failure in school. Learning takes time, but the assessments are taking up the time that Ms. K would otherwise spend in engaging children to think deeply about the world by telling and writing their own stories and plays, by counting beans, by listening to books and acting them out, by making up a number game, by singing songs, and drawing pictures, and splashing paint onto paper to illustrate a book or a math problem.
These are the kinds of experiences that allow innovation and creative thinking to flourish. This is how curiosity is born and a love of learning and the belief in possibility and the confidence to try. I want today's kindergarten children to grow into the best members of society, which are those who can innovate and create and think for themselves. Kindergarten is when children learn to enjoy school. So, when does that training come? If we are not going to instill a love of learning and imaginative thinking in five year olds, then when will we do it? Classrooms are now boardrooms. The only thing that counts is the numbers.
But a vital love of learning and the deep satisfaction that comes from finding out how the world works is not measured by filling in a circle to get the right answer.
Ms. K pulls outs the answer sheets for the children who missed two questions. They filled in two spaces on those instead of one, as five years old might typically do. Ms. K knows these children are not "at risk". She says often, "These administrators have killed the art of my profession. I'm not a teacher anymore, I'm a data collector and a data analyst, and that's not the job I trained for or love."
But if Ms. K wants to keep her job, she needs to sit at her desk awhile longer. She still has another stack of papers: data to input, reading groups to shuffle, answer sheets to print. Tomorrow she begins again, looking at data to be sure the children are learning, objective by objective.
