More Than a Score (45 page)

There are important reasons why literature should be an essential aspect of education, and whenever we say literature we are referring to good literature, outstanding books written for children and young adults, in poetry, in historical and contemporary fiction, in biographies, in nonfiction books of literary and artistic quality, in drama.

Children and youth deserve the best, and when it comes to language nothing is superior to good poetry, to good literature. Yes, it is important that students are able to read and understand informational text, but informational text does exactly what it is intended to do: it provides information. Literature does far much more; what it provides cannot be underestimated nor dismissed or restricted without terrible detriment.

Literature is the product of the pondering and analysis of human experiences and emotions. It invites reflection, allowing readers to gain insight on human behavior, to better understand themselves and others.

Literature requires mastery in the crafting of words, in order to be engaging and compelling. It not only gives an example of the power of language but becomes a model of living consciously, of paying attention to what happens around us, of discovering a deeper meaning in life.

All cultures have created poetry and various forms of literature, even in the oldest periods of history, or the most remote corners, even when they did not have a written language. This tells us something about the human thirst for the aesthetic experience literature provides. And the literary creations have been preserved, transmitted orally from generation to generation, as proof of how valued and cherished they have been.

Of course we want students to have information, and to learn how to retrieve existing information, but this must not be done at the expense of giving them the possibility to know and reflect about the dilemmas that life presents, the need to make choices that is part of daily living, as literature does.

A mind used to reflecting and analyzing will be much better prepared to face information with a discerning mind. A child or a young person who enjoys reading because he or she was given the opportunity to read enjoyable, exciting, intriguing, thrilling, delightful books will face with joy, interest, and ease informational texts.

There is a claim, to support the supplanting of good literature by informational reading, that as adults students will have to read manuals of great complexity. The argument must be made that perhaps manuals could be written with greater clarity if those who write them would have a better background in expository writing. Let's fix the manuals, not deprive the students.

A final point of great importance. Literature can also be highly informative about a multiplicity of themes. It seems, though, that frequently the only recognition to the contribution of literature to the enrichment of knowledge is given to historical fiction. Teachers could benefit from being pointed in the direction of books that combine high literary quality and sound information about a multiplicity of topics, not only historical ones. This would be more beneficial than restricting the time and support given to the presence in the curriculum to one of the most valuable tools to educate: great books.

Here now is the FairTest letter that I and others signed urging Obama to rethink his commitment to high-stakes testing:

 

President Barack Obama

The White House

Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Obama,

We the undersigned children's book authors and illustrators write to express our concern for our readers, their parents and teachers. We are alarmed at the negative impact of excessive school testing mandates, including your Administration's own initiatives, on children's love of reading and literature. Recent policy changes by your Administration have not lowered the stakes. On the contrary, requirements to evaluate teachers based on student test scores impose more standardized exams and crowd out exploration.

We call on you to support authentic performance assessments, not simply computerized versions of multiple-choice exams. We also urge you to reverse the narrowing of curriculum that has resulted from a fixation on high-stakes testing.

Our public school students spend far too much time preparing for reading tests and too little time curling up with books that fire their imaginations. As Michael Morpurgo, author of the Tony Award Winner 
War Horse
, put it, “It's not about testing and reading schemes, but about loving stories and passing on that passion to our children.”

Teachers, parents and students agree with British author Philip Pullman, who said, “We are creating a generation that hates reading and feels nothing but hostility for literature.” Students spend time on test practice instead of perusing books. Too many schools devote their library budgets to test-prep materials, depriving students of access to real literature. Without this access, children also lack exposure to our country's rich cultural range.

This year has seen a growing national wave of protest against testing overuse and abuse. As the authors and illustrators of books for children, we feel a special responsibility to advocate for change. We offer our full support for a national campaign to change the way we assess learning so that schools nurture creativity, exploration, and a love of literature from the first day of school through high school graduation.

Alma Flor Ada,   Alma Alexander,   Jane Ancona,   Maya Angelou,   Jonathan Auxier,   Kim Baker,   Molly Bang,   Tracy Barrett,   Chris Barton,   Ari Berk,   Judy Blume,   Alfred B. (Fred) Bortz,   Lynea Bowdish,   Sandra Boynton,   Shellie Braeuner,   Ethriam Brammer,   Louann Mattes Brown,   Anne Broyles,   Michael Buckley,   Janet Buell,   Dori Hillestad Butler,   Charito Calvachi-Mateyko,   Valerie Scho Carey,   Rene Colato Lainez,   Henry Cole,   Ann Cook,   Karen Coombs,   Robert Cortez,   Cynthia Cotten,   Bruce Coville,   Ann Crews,   Donald Crews,   Nina Crews,   Rebecca Kai Dotlich,   Laura Dower,   Kathryn Erskine,   Jules Feiffer,   Jody Feldman,   Mary Ann Fraser,   Sharlee Glenn,   Barbara Renaud Gonzalez,   Laurie Gray,   Trine M. Grillo,   Claudia Harrington,   Sue Heavenrich,   Linda Oatman High,   Anna Grossnickle Hines,   Lee Bennett Hopkins,   Phillip Hoose,   Diane M. Hower,   Michelle Houts,   Mike Jung,   Kathy Walden Kaplan,   Amal Karzai,   Jane Kelley,   Elizabeth Koehler-Pentacoff,   Amy Goldman Koss,   JoAnn Vergona Krapp,   Nina Laden,   Sarah Darer Littman,   José Antonio López,   Mariellen López,   Jenny MacKay,   Marianne Malone,   Ann S. Manheimer,   Sally Mavor,   Diane Mayr,   Marissa Moss,   Yesenia Navarrete Hunter,   Sally Nemeth,   Kim Norman,   Geraldo Olivo,   Alexis O'Neill,   Anne Marie Pace,   Amado Peña,   Irene Peña,   Lynn Plourde,   Ellen Prager, PhD,   David Rice,   Armando Rendon,   Joan Rocklin,   Judith Robbins Rose,   Sergio Ruzzier,   Barb Rosenstock,   Liz Garton Scanlon,   Lisa Schroeder,   Sara Shacter,   Wendi Silvano,   Janni Lee Simner,   Sheri Sinykin,   Jordan Sonnenblick,   Ruth Spiro,   Heidi E. Y. Stemple,   Whitney Stewart,   Shawn K. Stout,   Steve Swinburne,   Carmen Tafolla,   Kim Tomsic,   Duncan Tonatiuh,   Patricia Thomas,   Kristin O'Donnell Tubb,   Deborah Underwood,   Corina Vacco,   Audrey Vernick,   Debbie Vilardi,   Judy Viorst,   K. M. Walton,   Wendy Wax,   April Halprin Wayland,   Carol Weis,   Rosemary Wells,   Lois Wickstrom,   Suzanne Morgan Williams,   Kay Winters,   Ashley Wolff,   Lisa Yee,   Karen Romano Young,   Jane Yolen,   Roxyanne Young,   Paul O. Zelinsky,   Jennifer Ziegler

“It Was the Right Thing to Do”

This interview was conducted on January 15, 2014, and has been edited and condensed.

Jesse Hagopian:
Let's start with your own personal history with standard testing. Talk a little bit about what's been your experience with these tests, as a student, a middle school teacher, or now as a principal at South Side high school, that helped shape your views on standardized testing?

Carol Burris:
One of my big passions as a principal has been the elimination of tracking and giving all kids the best curriculum that schools have to offer, and so part of the interest that I've always had in testing is the role that it plays in the sorting and selecting of kids and how inaccurate that process is. I became very concerned when I started to see the move toward sorting teachers by scores into categories, and sorting kids into one of four categories, and then having this label of “college-readiness” attached to it I felt that was part of a larger picture of the way American schools tend to look at kids, you know, almost in boxes, and make decisions on their lives based on test scores.

JH:
That's right—unfortunately we see that test-and-track policy all over the country.

CB:
Now, in our school, we don't believe tracking—that's not our philosophy, so for example, any kid who wants to take International Baccalaureate (IB), or any kid who wants to take science research, we let them take it. We are not interested in sorting kids. At this point we have almost no sorting left; we have almost complete heterogeneous grouping. As of next year, there will only be levels left in twelfth-grade math and social students and even that will be by student choice. We have never been a test-score-driven school, that's not what we have been about. We do not give any standardized tests. We do have in the year course exams, the Regents exam, which is a curriculum-based test, and the International Baccalaureate exams, which are curriculum-based tests, but we don't have any of the standardized norm-reference tests that compare one student to another. In our district, although we've given the [grade] three to eight tests, we've never used them to sort children in any way. So the idea of sorting teachers into categories, in part by student test scores, was something that troubled me deeply. I do not believe it is valid or reliable in any way, and I just don't believe in the philosophy that a number on a test should be used to make big decisions for the lives of kids.

JH:
Do you remember a time when you realized that these tests were being used to rank and sort rather than enrich education; was there something that happened in your own life?

CB:
When it first started it appeared innocuous, with NCLB, and it was only in the fourth and eighth grades. It was not used for teacher evaluations, it was used for school accountability. In the very beginning, if you remember, it was pretty easy to make AYP [adequate yearly progress] and we used it primarily to identify kids who needed help and the tests were transparent. We could see the tests so that, for example, “Look at this, all of the kids got the poetry questions wrong, we need to put more poetry in our curriculum,” and you know that wasn't a bad thing, Jesse, it was actually a good thing. So in the beginning when these tests first came out they were used to inform instruction, they were used to modify curriculum, and they were used to identify the kids who really needed help. But what's happened since then, because of Race to the Top, is everything has gotten far more intense. First the state started adding other grade levels from third to eighth grade.

Then all of a sudden what started to happen in 2011 is that the testing time zoomed up so that the fifth grade test, for example, was 227 percent longer than it had been prior. There were more testing days and they started adding more high-stakes consequences: high-stakes consequences for the teachers, evaluating them by the test scores; for principals, evaluating them by the kids' test scores. The Common Core tests became a lot more difficult, and they raised the cut score at the same time, which made them even more of a toxic mix.