Social Class and School Achievement
North of 50 - Fair Comment
Don Sawyer
In my March column I wrote about my difficulties training university professors to think in terms of student outcomes, or "behavioural objectives." In response to this piece, I had an interesting letter from a reader in Penticton, who first asked me to describe what the heck I meant by behavioural objectives, and then went on to ask some provocative questions about my thoughts on the BCTF's concerns around provincial testing at the grade 4 and 7 levels. After all, he pointed out, the tests are given to measure reading/writing/arithmetic skill levels. Wouldn't this be a perfect case of behavioural objectives being assessed after strategies for achieving them had been implemented?
First I want to apologize for using "ed speak." Sometimes we get so used to the terminology of our workplace that we forget that its lingo is only accessible to the initiated. Occasionally this professional jargon is used to keep those not in the club (including parents and kids in this case) at arm's length and on the defensive. Anyway, behavioural objectives are clear statements of what a teacher wants a student to be able to do or know as a result of a lesson: At the end of the lesson the student will be able to name all the moving parts of a diesel engine with 90% accuracy. Inherent in behavioural objectives is the idea that they are clearly measurable. As I mentioned in the original article, this becomes a whole lot harder when your objective is to increase students' empathy for Canadians living under the poverty line or helping students develop greater self-esteem. These are "affective" objectives and are a much harder to measure -- and are often ignored as a result.
But onto the reader's second question regarding provincial testing. As many are aware, standardized tests are problematic from all sorts of points of view - cultural bias, level of life experience, developmental differences, etc. Nonetheless, I think most educators would agree that some accountability -- to the student as well as the community as a whole -- is important. I can't speak for the BCTF, but for me the problem is how exam results are used. On an individual or small group basis, testing can provide teachers with valuable feedback on the effectiveness of their teaching. They can also demonstrate student learning and help diagnose problem areas.
One difficulty, again, is that they are almost useless in assessing such important areas as self-esteem development, critical thinking capacity, and interpersonal skills. But fair enough if those are measured and recognized in other ways. (Unfortunately, of course, they usually aren't.) When I taught English, and especially developmental reading, I generally gave reading pre- and post-tests so that we could see the progress students made. These gave us a baseline and an ability to show progress the student -- and to the community.
The main issue with the administration of province-wide exams is the well-documented -- and truly staggering -- correlation between performance on standardized tests and the socio-economic background of students. It is so overwhelming as to be somewhat demoralizing. As a teacher, students enter your classroom with deeply entrenched attitudes and skill levels, much of which (especially in the earlier grades) schools did little create and, alas, have a limited ability to impact. (For a compelling analysis of this phenomenon, have a look at James Traub's "What no Schools Can Do," New York Times Magazine, January 16, 2000.)
The result of administering standardized exams on a blanket basis is to largely confirm what we already know: kids coming from homes with lots of books, where they are read to on a regular basis, where oral conversation is rich and ongoing, where television is rarely on, where magazines and newspapers are subscribed to, and where exposure to travel and cultural activities are routine, consistently and shockingly outperform their peers that do not come from such environments. Another predictable result is that the Fraser Institute (and other agencies with agendas) rank school performances provincially and then crow about the superiority of schools like St. Michaels and Crofton House and cluck disapprovingly at the woeful underperformance of rural, central urban and aboriginal systems. The test results, they contend, reveal "Each school's overall rating and answers the question, 'In general, how is the school doing academically?'"
But why bother? By simply looking at the socio-economic make-up of the schools in our province we can largely answer this question without the need for "objective" testing results. There are, to be sure, many examples of individual teachers, students, classes and even schools that defy the odds. But most of these get made into movies.
The real challenge is not to tell us what we already know, but to instead help us learn something we don't know. Like how to address these crippling inequities instead of legitimizing them through our school system and credentialing apparatus.
Don Sawyer is a writer, educator and former director of Okanagan College's International Development Centre. He lives with his wife in Salmon Arm.
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