[Local-Maine-Schools] Measuring Progress

[Gail Marshall]

One other point (well, one of the many other points) I wish to make  
is that when educational improvement is discussed within this current  
debate, it is done almost exclusively within the context of test  
scores. I think that narrow focus has pauperized our discussions  
about what it really means to succeed as a student, a citizen and as  
a school. I believe it guarantees that many fine young people will  
find it harder and harder to find a place within our educational  
system.  That is one of the most corrosive and harmful effects of No  
Child Left Behind and Maine Learning Results.  It is a focus that the  
Commissioner uses almost exclusively in explaining her educationally- 
based reasons for her actions, and it is behind the rationale of  
almost every study that knocks or praises what we do. At Union 98 we  
frequently discuss concerns about this slide, but I see us loosing  
considerable ground in that debate in the past few years. It is so  
much easier to point to a bar graph or a chart to measure success  
than to take the full measure of a student or a curriculum. And it is  
all too easy to blame the students and teachers when the numbers  
don't add up.
On Monday when Ms. Gendron was dissing current test scores did you  
wonder how many Legislators were asking themselves questions like:   
who made the tests, are they appropriate, who decides what is  
adequate work and what isn't, does that rubric change at all from  
year to year, how does the SAT fit into that, how are all these tests  
useful to teachers in helping the students? Were they remembering the  
MEA debacle a few years ago when the tests were all rewritten, had  
outlandish expectations, weren't piloted (this is a recording), and  
had test booklets too big for the average 4th grade desktop-to name  
only one small but telling problem with forethought from DOE?
This may sound tangential, but from our web page I just finished  
reading my umteenth report about Maine's educational system based  
purely on test scores. And how those test scores don't justify the  
money we spend on education. It is an important part of the debate,  
but like most other facts being cited in this rush to "reform", it  
has been distorted almost beyond recognition. It plays into the sense  
that all DOE and the Legislature need to do to change educational  
policy is to read a few studies and test score reports and hack away.  
(Until they hire another expert to tell them to hack in a different  
direction.)  And that's one of the reasons why we never seem to get  
legislation or policy that values  and reflects input from those "in  
the trenches".

Gail Marshall