This idea has been rumbling around my head for years.  As I continue the preliminary work on my dissertation, mentor urban high school teachers and work with charter schools, I find this to be more and more true.  Testing has become the new “reform” movement in urban education.  And not just annual testing–but every 6 week testing.  As a researcher, I can appreciate the need/desire for data.  As a teacher, I appreciate the need for data.  It is the means by which we gauge how our students are doing.  But it has to be contextualized.  When we test just to test there is no context for the student and without context and prior knowledge, the test and its questions are meaningless.

Tests and assessments of where students are and how they are doing, should be formative and not standardized.  This isn’t to say that standardized tests don’t have a place at the table, but they should be the only guests invited.  Too often they are the only guests in urban schools, leaving our poor and too often minority kids being tested instead of taught.  This focus on testing also limits the type of education they are exposed to and leads to a curriculum that is grounded in test prep benchmarks and not grounded in what is good for kids.  There are so many reasons why this irritates me and one of them is that it prevents me from sending my kids to public schools in the city where I live.  There are no options available, charter or traditional, that do not have a central focus on testing and measuring, that I can send my kids to.  This isn’t to say that some of these schools whose central standard of evaluation is testing, do not offer a decent education for kids, but the level of education is dictated and restricted by the testing and doesn’t fit with my kids needs or my philosophy of education.

I hate that there aren’t public school options that mirror my own educational philosophy in my city.  The suburban schools are better on so many levels–because the tests are just part of what happens and most only use the state standardized test and that test doesn’t dictate content or experience.  I also am irritated that almost every new school that opens follows this testing model as though it is the only urban reform that works. It is the easiest urban reform, but not the only one.  I long for a new public school to open that actually thinks about how kids learn and not how to best test kids. If there was a public school option that actually put kids learning first and testing at the end of the line, I would stop paying $14k a year per kid for private school.

Now don’t get me wrong, I believe that students need to be assessed.  We must know where our students are strong and where they are weak, but there are many other ways to assess a student beyond a nationally normed standardized test.  My son is assessed regularly and both of his teachers can tell me at any time where he is excelling and where he is struggling and his school does not use standardized tests and doesn’t have textbooks–aside from Math starting in 5th grade.  The school produces National Merit Scholars (5 this year).  Yes the school is made up of middle-class and upper-middle class families.  But I argue that I want the exact same things for my kids that all parents want for their kids–a great education.  I want the same thing for my kids that I believe every kids deserves.

The education I have chosen for my kids is not for every child.  I think that is why choice is so important.  Sure as new schools open, they are giving parents a choice but not the level of choice that parents needs.  Some kids need more hands on learning, some kids need more freedom, some kids need strict structure.  We have to have choices, but choice for choice sake isn’t enough.  We need real choices.  We need philosophical choices.  We need pedagogical choices.  We need to work with parents to allow them to pick the best environment for their children.

We need a revolution in education lead by educators and parents.  Not by master marketers,  businessmen and politicians.  Choice must be part of it, but it has to be real choice that offers something different.  Something better.  Something that puts kids first.  We can argue that the good models are the restrictive, extended day charter schools that focus on testing.  But where is the something different to compare them too?  One size does not fit all and if this is the only road we are going to explore, we will end up exactly where we are now, wondering what the answer is and how we fix our educational system.

Crap–I’m going to have to start my own flippin school.