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Author: Arthur T. Costigan III, Ph.D.
Article submitted: “ ‘It’s like nothing you prepared us for’: Emerging teachers’ perceptions of high stakes testing”
Home information: Arthur Costigan
512 East 79th Street, #3-A
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Work information: Arthur T. Costigan III, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Education
Secondary Education
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Queens College, CUNY
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Flushing, New York 11367-1597
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Specialization: Education students’ beliefs about teaching and learning; literacy in urban schools; secondary education; English education.
“IT’S LIKE NOTHING YOU PREPARED US FOR”:
EMERGING TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONS OF HIGH STAKES TESTING
Arthur Costigan
Queens College, City University of New York
Paper presented to the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Leeds, 13-15 September 2001
Abstract
Unlike educational systems in the United Kingdom and most of Europe, the United States has no national educational system, and therefore no national educational testing system. Recently many state departments of education have attempted to implement educational reform through increased high-stakes testing. New York State, for instance, traditionally has had minimum competency tests for all elementary, middle- and high school students, and it has had high stakes testing for highly academically-inclined secondary students. Recently, however, all students have been required to take rigorous standardized tests.
This study followed six education students in New York City through their first semester of full-time teaching. These beginning teachers clearly related that the culture of high stakes testing they found in schools was at odds with their understanding of best practice in elementary and middle-school instruction.
“IT’S LIKE NOTHING YOU PREPARED US FOR”:
EMERGING TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONS OF HIGH STAKES TESTING
City University of New York Arthur Costigan
Queens College,
Introduction
As education students in New York City emerge from their education courses into their first year of full-time teaching, they grapple with an educational culture that is increasingly driven, on state, district, and school levels, by more rigorous student testing. This study is an attempt to understand how an educational reform movement, driven by high stakes testing, influences six beginning teachers’ understanding of their practice, as they are engaged by, and engaged with, the demands of increased student testing. This study is also part of on-going research into how pre-service and beginning teachers, those whom I have come to call “emerging teachers,” understand themselves as teachers and learners.
Like many other districts nationwide, New York City has created an educational culture which, over the last decade or so, has attempted educational reform through student and teacher accountability on high stakes tests (Mills, 2000, April 14; Gordon 2000, Fall; NCTE, 2000, November 22). This testing has become both carrot and stick, both defining what teachers are to teach and students are to learn, as well as assessing how well those teachers have taught and how well their students have learned. In New York, high stakes testing is the subject of talk in teachers lounges and at faculty conferences. There is also a very public discussion in newspapers and on the television of the benefits and disadvantages of increased testing (Miller, 2001, March 2; Wellstone & Kozol, 2001, March 13). Parents and students have begun to boycott testing at individual schools (Zernike, 2001, May 3) and protests have been held in the state capitol (Pérez-Peña, 2001, May 8). Such a professionally and publicly controversial testing culture has a very real impact on pre-service and beginning teachers’ understanding of the teaching craft.
In a study of first-year teachers in the city, Rust (1994), shows that high stakes testing is clearly a factor in a new teacher’s experience:
Then there’s the pressure of the test. Next week they are supposed to do the practice PEP test. Now are they telling me not to teach to the test? Right in front of me, I have exactly what the kids need to learn. Honestly, I’m tempted, mostly because the wording of the test is different from the tests they are accustomed to. With 14 kids [in the third grade] reading on grade 2 [level], I have to worry if they understand the instructions…This is a conundrum (p.210-211)
Lora, a beginning teacher in this study, clearly indicates how much a factor a testing culture has become in her conception of teaching, “Almost every faculty and department meeting is revolved around the test. Because that’s the focus of the school. They say, ‘Keep preparing them for the test. This is what you should be doing.’ It puts unnecessary pressure on the teacher.”
High stakes testing is also a concern of professional organizations (Miller, 2001, March 2). Since 1999, the National Council of Teachers of English [NCTE] has passed three resolutions against dangers this organization sees in high stakes testing, and this organization has articulated a critical opinion about this phenomenon: “The use of such tests has continued to escalate and to cause evident measurable damage to teaching and learning in US schools.” (NCTE, 2000, November 22, p. 1) Despite public debate as to the merits and problems of high stakes testing (Gordon, 2000, Fall; Hartocollis, 2001, February 28), this situation is not likely to change soon (Mills, 2000, April 24).
The transition from being education students to full-time teaching is extremely complex (Wideen, Mayer-Smith, & Moon, 1998). Although issues of control (McNeil, 1988) and survival (Rust, 1994) remain a primary concern, in New York and other cities, high stakes testing has emerged as an additional factor in how new teachers learn, execute, and understand their craft.
This study asks how six urban education students engage a culture of high stakes testing into their educational practice as they emerge into their first year of full-time teaching. As such, it is an attempt to investigate in what manner these beginning teachers interweave progressive and traditional educational paradigms. As a teacher educator I am sympathetic to the difficulties of Susanne, Nadine, Lora, Maryanne, Beth and Christine in their transition from being education students to full-time teachers, an experience which is frequently traumatic for new teachers (Rust, 1994). In this light, this study seeks to open a conversation about ways in which urban schools of education can continue to converse with, and assist, new teachers after they have officially graduated from education programs, as well as to investigate ways in which high stakes testing can be negotiated into a best practice which is personally gratifying for new teachers, and which they see as beneficial for their students.
Background
New York City
Susanne, Nadine, Lora, Maryanne, Beth and Christine, the participants in this study, are all graduates from local New York City public high schools. During this study they had attended and graduated from a small private liberal arts college in a residential area within the five boroughs of the city. As education students, they had spent over 100 hours observing in local schools. They have a considerably complex understanding of the political realities of education in the city, and they are aware of four well-known and very public realties. First, New York City faces an enormous teacher shortage and is loosing teachers faster than they can replace them (NY1, 2000, November 23). In this New York reflects an impending shortage of teachers across the nation, perhaps as many as 200,000 per year (Feiman-Nemser, et al., 1999). Secondly, the participants are aware that schools are rated by test scores regularly published in The New York Times and other media, and that the city’s mayor has publicly demanded that salary raises for individual teachers be tied to their students’ performance on standardized tests. Thirdly, the participants were aware that high stakes testing is situated in a troublesome local educational milieu. High school dropout rates in New York are estimated from 46% of students (Kozol, 1991, p. 112) to 30% (Board of Education, 1996, p. 9). For the class of 1992, for instance, only 47% of high school students graduated on time, 15.5% dropped out of school, 37.3% were still enrolled and going on to a fifth year of high school, and 18.17% of students were labeled “discharged” (Board of Education, 1996). Of students who entered high school in 1997, only 56% had met Math Regents Exam sequence in order to graduate (Goodnough, 2001a, March 15). Due to failure on state tests, nearly half of May 2001 seniors may be ineligible to graduate (NY1, 2001, March 15). In elementary and middle schools, less than 30% of students have been assessed as having skills at or above grade level (Board of Education, NYC, 1996).
Lastly, the participants in this study are aware that high stakes testing is relatively new. Until the mid-1990s, pupils only had to graduate from high school by passing a series of minimal competency exams [RCTs] to graduate from high school.
Literature
In a study of 100 student self-drawings of themselves as test-takers, Wheelock, Bebell and Haney (2000) sought to understand the impact of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System [MCAS], a series of intentionally rigorous standardized state-wide tests. While they found that some drawings were positive, representing student confidence and diligence, the drawings presented more instances of negative presentations which included anxiety, pessimism, boredom, and “loss of motivation” (p. 11). Such tests may cause student alienation, particularly in minorities (Miller, 2001, March 2). It is hard to understand how beginning teachers can not be affected by this situation.
In an address to the New York State Association of Teacher Educators [NYSATE], Richard Mills, the New York State Education Comissioner (Mills, 2000, April 14) compared Massachusetts MCAS exams to New York’s Regent’s system and stated that such examinations were a valid means to increase student learning, and that they would remain despite student protests then occurring in Massachusetts.
As a recent phenomenon, the effect that high stakes testing has on pre-service and beginning teachers has only begun to be assessed, but critical voices have been heard since the late 1990s (NCTE, 2000). Beverly Gordon in her editorial for the Fall, 2000 American Education Research Journal explains that
Not surprisingly, the demand for educators and students to achieve high scores on these tests has resulted in questionable pedagogical strategies. In my own state, for example, the proficiency test does not reflect the current curriculum in the schools. In response to this mismatch, the state department of public instruction is now putting pressure on the districts, [who] in turn are putting pressure on teachers to revise their classroom curriculum so that it will teach to the test – Great pedagogical strategy! (Gordon, 2000, Fall, p. 3)
The reality of high stakes testing in many school districts demands that beginning teachers need support to face a situation of raised expectations which causes new teachers much stress (Feiman-Nemser, Carver, Scwhille, & Yusco, 1999).
Situating Educational Research in New York
Although this study is situated in the emotionally and politically charged milieu of increased and more rigorous testing of students, it also is situated in the on-going educational concern with the scope and nature of teacher induction programs. In New York City, most schools of education have an educational orientation variously labeled as constructivist, progressive, or social reconstructivist (Wideen, Mayer-Smith & Moon, 1998). Following John Dewey in the early part of this century, this orientation is sensitive to the personal, social and cultural histories of students. In this context, the learner is seen as an active construer of knowledge who learns through interaction with her fellow students in a multi-disciplinary, project oriented, and investigatory way. This approach also emphasizes “authentic assessment” using the presentation of student projects and the creation of student portfolios.
In contrast, educational reform in New York, as in most large urban centers, has de-emphasized the personal and contextual aspects of students’ learning. (Weiner, 2001). Perhaps chiefly due to an ever increasing need to educate a massive and diverse body of students (1.1 million in 2001), many public schools in New York, as many urban schools in the United States, use a transmissive, fact- and skills-oriented “commonsense” (Mayher, 1992) standardized educational approach. In opposition to the student-centered constructivist approaches of most of New York’s’ schools of education, state and local school reform seems to emphasizes that teachers primarily lecture and that students memorize this information to pass standardized tests.
Some educational research indicates that teacher education programs do have an influence on beginning teachers, particularly after the first traumatic year of teaching. This research indicates that graduates of education programs ultimately have more effective teaching skills than those who have not had such preparation (Grossman, 1990; Grossman & Valencia, 2000; Rust, 1999). On the other hand, other educational research indicates that programs of teacher induction have little effect on the firmly held beliefs of beginning teachers (see Wideen, et al., 1998). This strand of research holds that the beliefs of new teachers are strongly based on their “implicit institutional biographies” and may contribute to “well-worn and commonsense images of the teacher’s work” (Britzman, 1986, p. 443) which emphasizes teaching as a “simple and mechanical transfer of information” (Wideen, et. al, 1998, p. 143). It seems clear that pre-service and beginning teachers must negotiate a personal best practice which accommodates both a constructivist approach emphasized in the majority of New York’s schools of education, and their weltanschauung (worldview) of New York’s traditional academic culture. Weber and Mitchell (1996) indicate that the polarities of “progressive” (constructivist) and “conservative” (transmissive) have become unhelpful dichotomies in understanding the complex situation of new teachers, but they do indicate that these labels represent educational views which must be interwoven in education students’ self understanding of themselves as teachers.
Paying attention to Emerging Teachers
This study is part of a larger study which followed six participants through two the two semesters of their senior year as undergraduates with an education minor, through their semester of full-time teaching. In the fall semester of their senior year, twenty-two education students attending a small liberal arts college in the New York City area, were enrolled in a mandated New York State teacher education course called Assessment and Evaluation in the Classroom. These students were asked to keep a learning journal and to write about what they anticipated would be their experiences in their first year of teaching. Eight members of this class were followed in the next semester of supervised teaching. As two had dropped out of the study, the remaining six were interviewed near the end of their first semester of full-time teaching.