Interestingly, Teach For America presents itself as a non-profit dedicated to systemic change within America's educational system, from the ground up; in practice, though, it actually fits right into that proverbial "system." Much of the disdain for today's system is related to the contemporary practice of testing kids into oblivion, and then using those tests to make sweeping decisions regarding the kids themselves, schools, districts, teachers, and curricula. Teachers, parents, and students alike lament that, while such data present a certain snapshot of a child's academic standing, it does not (and cannot) encompass a child's entire story, nor illustrate their exact needs. Further, these test scores are often used to justify ill treatment of teachers, the complete overhaul of schools, and the elimination of "non-testing" subjects, such as foreign languages, the arts, and extra-curricular programs. The time and money saved from cutting these subjects out is usually then put toward programs designed to increase instruction in reading and math (the two areas most often tested), and help scores in those areas increase.
Study after study after study suggest that centering curricula and instruction around the ultimate goal of passing a high-stakes test does no favors for teachers or students. The pressure to produce data that makes the school (and teachers and admin) look good -- pressure that is sometimes linked to funding, teacher pay, or even a student's ability to graduate -- can cause high levels of stress and a tendency to teach test-taking strategies in place of a balanced curriculum. In some cases, such as the infamous scandal in Atlanta that resulted in the arrest of some teachers and administrators, this pressure is met by cheating on the tests.
At my school, nobody knew of a specific curriculum that we were supposed to use. When questioned, Mrs. Lawrence insisted that "the standards" were our curriculum (meaning the Common Core standards, which were later changed to the very similar Nevada Academic Content Standards). In other words, we were supposed to teach those standards, but there wasn't really any direction in how to do that. Every day, we were supposed to address the standard being taught (and there are a lot of them, for each subject) and then teach it. The tough part is that many times the standards overlap, so trying to focus on and teach a specific standard on a specific day isn't always beneficial when you're trying to put together whole units.
Each of the grade levels at my school even had pacing calendars that showed which standards were being taught every single day of the year, and most of the time a single standard was spread out over the course of a week. So, for example, the calendar might show that 5th grade was teaching RL.5.2 every day for an entire week, and our instruction had to mirror that expectation. But when you're a new teacher perusing material created by older, more experienced teachers (which can be found on such lifesaving sites as Teachers Pay Teachers; Read, Write, Think; Better Lesson; Engage NY, and myriad others), it's quite clear that, typically, multiple standards are addressed throughout the course of a few weeks when you're engaging students with a well-crafted unit. You might be addressing both RL.5.2 and RL.5.5 on one day, and then only addressing RL.5.3 on another. But at my school, we were expected to stick to directly teaching a single standard over the course of, usually, one week.
Then, the students would be assessed three times a year with Discovery Education or Aimsweb tests that would highlight the specific standards that most students were "low" in, and we'd be required to have an Intense Week, in which those specific standards were drilled into students' heads. Intensely. (Let me stop for a minute, too, and let you know that if all of these terms are a bit confusing, I hear you -- I felt the same way when I was first introduced to them, which also happened to be the time I had to learn how to teach with them.)
Mrs. Lawrence's ultimate goal was to raise the star rating of the school. She cared about student achievement, but only as measured by data produced from tests. And she only cared about whether students were "green" (meaning proficient). Any students who scored "yellow" or "red" (meaning below grade level) were not recognized for any growth if they hadn't made it to "green" yet. This meant that if a student entered 5th grade at a 1st grade reading level, and then proceeded to show tremendous growth and demonstrate a 3rd grade reading level by mid-year (which is a huge feat, let me tell you), it did not matter at all. Such students were still seen as failing and bringing the school down (you can't raise a star rating with mediocre test scores), and the teachers were seen as not doing their jobs well enough.
And she thought the best way to make sure that teachers were producing students with outstanding test scores was to put tremendous pressure on us and instill a sense of competition over who had the best data. Throughout the school, our walls were decorated not with student work, but with test data pertaining to grade levels, and also to individual teachers. Mrs. Lawrence liked to display all of the data everywhere so that everybody knew whose classes were performing well and whose were not. Although the high-stakes, end-of-year CRT (Criterion Reference Test) wasn't used in this way, there were plenty of other tests, used as CRT predictors, that were.
Walking through the school, you could therefore see that so-and-so's class was 67% proficient in reading, but so-and-so's class, in the same grade level, was only 39% proficient. And then the judgement could begin. The former was obviously a "good" teacher and the latter a "bad" one, and a subtle divide between the "good" teachers and the "bad" teachers (otherwise known as the ones that Mrs. Lawrence did and did not like, respectively) began.
My data wasn't terrible. But it certainly wasn't the best. To be honest, at the start of the year I didn't care very much about test scores; I wanted, for example, to teach my students to be deep, critical thinkers and how to appreciate literature rather than how to respond to it on a standardized test (and I know that the two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive -- I just didn't see why the tests were weighed so heavily). But once the sanctions began, and the microscope began descending on those whose data wasn't considered good enough, I changed my tune. If you were one of the teachers Mrs. Lawrence zoomed in on with said microscope, your world changed. Sometimes she'd send strategists into your room all the damn time to observe what you were doing. Sometimes she'd make your lesson plan expectations a million times more detailed than for another teacher who was producing proficient test scores. Sometimes she'd call you into her office and have a nice little chat like the one I described in my last chapter. No matter what specifically happened, though, work life wasn't fun if you were one of "those" teachers.
I began to focus more on how to get my students to pass these freaking tests. I would spend hours looking through old tests, trying to figure out the best way to teach my kids how to answer questions. I even signed up to teach during our school's 10-week "CRT boot camp," which was four hours of school every Saturday. The purpose of Saturday school was to teach test-taking strategies to increase test scores. The entire thing was infused with phrases such as "we'll do our best on the test," and we taught students how to crack tests in much the same fashion as The Princeton Review.
As a side note, I want to throw out there that Saturday school was an awful decision on my part. My first year of teaching through TFA was one of the most stressful, difficult times of my life (and I've had my share of those), and dipping into one of my two days off in order to earn more money and increase test scores was not conducive to my physical or mental health. My two-year-old cat even died during this time, meaning that I'd spent a few sleepless nights at the veterinary clinic and shelled out money I didn't have trying to save my pet who didn't wind up making it. I wasn't in any shape to spend Saturday mornings at work. But I endured it.
I hated the testing culture at our school and the competition that Mrs. Lawrence tried to bring out in teachers. Don't get me wrong -- I usually enjoy healthy competition and love working my way up to the top in whatever I do. But I really felt like teachers should come together and work together for the benefit of all students, rather than develop a hyper-focus on ensuring that their own class performed better on the tests than anyone else's. And the latter was exactly what I felt Mrs. Lawrence wanted for the culture at our school. Although I worked with some great people, there was no real camaraderie. I began to develop paranoia about dishonesty and gossip pervading the school (if you're part of the bully's group, you're at least not the one getting bullied), and I know I'm not the only one who felt that way.
High-stakes testing, and the use of test data to make all decisions regarding schools, teachers, and students, is usually defended by a need to assess whether students are learning, and a need to hold teachers accountable. I think there are some non-educators out there who envision us teachers as lazy parasites who would sip wine in the classroom while our students did whatever the hell they wanted all day, if only we could get away with it. If only it weren't for those pesky legislators and non-educators with opinions, insisting that we actually teach!
Of course, I jest. Some research, though, has suggested that high-stakes testing, and the accompanying obsession with test data, is not the best way to measure accountability or achievement, or to improve education. You can't simply pressure teachers and students into producing impressive test data. This model runs education like a business, treating test scores like sales made. Rather, it's been suggested (and I agree) that the key to improving education is attacking the injustices that create educational inequity in the first place -- school funding linked to property taxes, for example, which guarantees that the richest neighborhoods get the best schools. There are social policies that would alleviate some of the stress that children from poor families experience, which can also lead to decreased academic success. We can start trusting the professional teachers to do what they know is best for their students, instead of legislating them into robots who deliver material. We can treat teachers as professionals and pay them as such, making the profession desirable for high school graduates to pursue, rather than leaving it as the "fall back" profession it's become to so many. We can hold students and parents accountable, not just teachers, for what happens in a student's academic life, and help struggling families. There is so much that can be done to improve education, and that vast array does not begin and end with tests.
Interestingly, while Teach For America presents itself as a non-profit dedicated to ending educational inequity, it does not attempt to attack any of the aforementioned causes of said inequity. Many of its leaders agree that these things are the causes, and much time is even spent during Institute and All Corps discussing poverty and racial inequality and other social ills that tend to be precursors to a lack of academic success. Still, when it comes to actual practice, Teach For America, in my experience, showed the same obsession with test data as my school did.
When my cohort (which meant we were all elementary school teachers led by the same MTLD) got together for meetings with Christy, she would spend a great deal of time talking about data. All of us had to send her updated data every month or so, and then during meetings she'd share it with all of us. She'd present graph after graph detailing what percentage of us were proficient in our test data, what percentage of us were approaching proficient, and what percentages had grown or decreased in test performance.
I understand that data is used to assess certain areas of student performance, and that's useful some of the time. What killed me was that, just like my school, Teach For America used the test data to measure whether or not we were successful as teachers. Were we being those life-changing, system-crashing educators we'd heard so much about at Institute? Well, the data got to decide. There were times when our "classroom vision" (which I still hadn't perfected) was addressed, and we were also assessed on that, but at the end of the day data dominated the question of whether we were doing well (or not).
One time, I asked Christy about this. Why, I wanted to know, did Teach For America focus so much on testing and data when it professes to be about changing the system from the inside out? She told me that because the system is currently all about testing and data, they have to work with that. I still didn't understand how anyone was going to change anything by maintaining the status quo, especially when many of us believed that the hyper-focus on data was more damaging to our students than anything. But for all of the social justice hype that TFA sold us, once we were in our classrooms we were encouraged to shut up about the injustices we felt our students -- and ourselves -- were facing due to the data obsession, and to fall in line with assuming that high test data was the equivalent of student achievement.
It has been noted in recent years that, at the same time it touts itself as an instrumental force in attacking educational inequity, TFA has been accepting large donations from companies that have a decided interest in the destruction of public education, namely Wal Mart. In addition, TFA has been known to be heavily involved in the creation of more and more charter schools, particularly KIPP (Knowledge is Power) schools. Critics say that support of the charter movement is actually assisting in the defamation and destruction of public education, funneling federal money into schools that function like public institutions, but are run more like private ones. So the questions remain -- if TFA is really about making sure every student has access to a quality education, why do they submit to practices believed to harm public school morale, why are they supported by donors known to advocate for-profit schools over public ones, and why do they support the spread of charter schools in place of traditional public ones? Salon hosted an interesting piece on TFA being a "pro-corporate, union-busting" company back in 2014, when I was still a corps member (this isn't an academic piece, but it does point to some of the issues I mentioned above and it's well documented).
I'm not going to jump out onto the limb that professes TFA to be a well-disguised corporate infiltration of the education system. But I will say that I think they've made some choices that don't match up with their supposed agenda of ending educational inequity.
In my experience, one of those choices was the obsession with testing and data. It didn't take me long during my first year to understand, as I was getting to know around 30 unique, young individuals, that high test data does not necessarily equate with good teaching. It may be one facet among many, but it isn't everything.
Teach For America, as I experienced it, did not really believe that.
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