{"id":497,"date":"2011-09-07T10:08:44","date_gmt":"2011-09-07T17:08:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/?p=497"},"modified":"2011-09-07T10:10:29","modified_gmt":"2011-09-07T17:10:29","slug":"re-bundling-teaching-testing-and-growing-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/?p=497","title":{"rendered":"Re-Bundling Teaching, Testing, and Growing Up"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

The Essential Elements<\/p><\/div>\n

We need to rebundle.<\/p>\n

For the past century, teaching, testing, and growing up have been tied into a bundle called school. \u00a0My schooling\u2014like that of every other student\u2014was a mixture of maturation and mental exercise, of intense bonding among peers under the watchful eyes of adults, who understood more than we thought they did.<\/p>\n

An illustration in the form of a short personal story:<\/p>\n

When I was in high school, I had a history teacher named Annette Sheel.\u00a0 I am sure Miss Sheel, which was the proper form of address in those days, marched through the curriculum: I remember a thick book by Henry Steele Commager.\u00a0 But Miss Sheel changed my life, not because of the official course of study, but by saying, \u201cI would like you to go with me tonight to hear a speech in Chicago.\u201d\u00a0 I appeared disinterested.\u00a0 \u201cMary is going,\u201d said Miss Sheel.\u00a0 The thought of riding to the city in the back seat of Miss Sheel\u2019s Oldsmobile with a person of great interest sold the deal.\u00a0 We arrived a little late at Orchestra Hall and were ushered to an upper balcony.\u00a0 I quickly realized that we were nearly the only white people in the auditorium, and way down on the stage was a Black man, a preacher from Alabama, who began to speak in a voice and with authority I had never heard before.<\/p>\n

He spoke of a bus boycott, and of being in jail in Birmingham, of the struggle to end a system of segregation that ruled the South by law and Chicago neighborhoods by practice and tradition.\u00a0 My worldview changed in the passage of an hour.<\/p>\n

There were other teachers, too.\u00a0 Some told me I was stupid because I couldn\u2019t spell.\u00a0 Still can\u2019t.\u00a0 Letters move around in my head a little.\u00a0 I had to get over those teachers and those issues to get on with life.\u00a0 (I had a personal method of test prep for essay questions where dictionaries were not allowed and handwritten responses were required.\u00a0 I\u2019d write three or four essays beforehand on topics that I thought related to questions that might be asked.\u00a0 I\u2019d memorize the key words.\u00a0 I\u2019d write it all out longhand to get into the practice of making it legible.\u00a0 My cursive is terrible, so I needed to train my hand as well as my spelling memory.\u00a0 Then, in the exam room, I\u2019d tweak the essays just enough so that they answered the question the test asked.)\u00a0 Never got good grades until graduate school, when thinking and synthesis counted more than recounting facts and spelling.<\/p>\n

Miss Sheel, it should be reported, was amazed at how we all turned out.\u00a0 At a class reunion 35 years later, my friends and I encountered her for the first time since we left high school.\u00a0 She stood ramrod straight, walking stick in one hand, with a straight-up Manhattan in the other.\u00a0 \u201cMy God, you all survived,\u201d she said, essentially giving us a lifetime grade of \u201cexceeds expectations.\u201d\u00a0 Then she took a sip.<\/p>\n

In Miss Sheel\u2019s classroom, growing up, teaching, and testing were tightly bundled, as they were throughout most of public education.\u00a0 In the high-trust education institution that existed for the first six decades of the past century, a teacher\u2019s grade book and periodic report cards were the definitive and authoritative statements about a student\u2019s achievement.\u00a0 External testing was relatively unimportant, except for the relatively few students headed toward selective colleges and universities for whom scores on the SAT or the ACT were weighty.\u00a0 Teachers also became gatekeepers and sorters of students in formal and informal ways, pointing students toward college or toward the schoolhouse door. \u00a0Even the teenager in Miss Sheel\u2019s class knew race and social class coded that student sorting.<\/p>\n

In the intervening decades, public education has moved from a high-trust and organizationally closed institution to one that is low trust and externally examined. \u00a0The drawstrings around the tight bundle of teaching, growing up, and assessment loosened in several ways:<\/p>\n