After reading both Campano and Cochran and Lytle, I realized how much of an impact Dr. Bogad’s class has had on my beliefs about teaching and learning. I came in to SED 552 fully believing that the ability of the standards movement to bring much needed attention to historically underserved student populations was a crucial part of educational reform. Yet during the course of Dr. Bogad’s class, I was forced to re-examine my long held beliefs, to confront my assumptions, and take a hard look at what has been sacrificed educationally for such attention.
I left class with the unsettling notion that deep, life changing learning has been replaced by easily assessed bits of knowledge, that the role of a teacher is no longer to inspire critical thinking but rather to “transmit” a narrow stream of knowledge to her students.
Thus I found myself shaking my head in agreement with Campano when he noted how “the aggrandizement of teaching methods and programs catered toward high-stakes tests has the effect of homogenizing classroom practice and devaluing the resources and experiences students bring to school” and that while “test scores may rise. . . such an approach may also inadvertently limit students’ full potential and stymie educators’ ability to learn from the diversity of their classrooms” (4). Campano argues that real teaching and learning evolve from something different than the “’scientifically based research’” and “’evidence- based education’” discussed in Cochran and Lytle’s piece (10).
Campano echoes the beliefs of many educators who are trying to meet the demands/expectations of the standards movement while creating authentic learning experiences for their students. Unfortunately, the current obsession with test scores, data, and teacher accountability, which derives from a “need to thrive in the new ‘knowledge society’ (Cochran and Lytle 8), has severely
limited, if not silenced altogether, the dialogue amongst educators, policy makers, and the communities they serve regarding the purpose of education. Educators are there to “produce a workforce that can meet the demands of the competitive global market and preserve. . . the nation’s place in that market” (8).
Period. End of story.
But at what cost?
This year, despite increasing expectations, the Attleboro High School English department has managed to meet our AYP goals for all of our low performing sub-groups. Yet, while I do take pride in the fact that we have successfully targeted our under-performing students and devised strategies to help them achieve success on MCAS, I no longer believe that we are empowering our students or “enhancing the life chances of all [our] students so that they have genuine choice about meaningful work, continued education, and civic engagement” (Cochran and Lytle 2). What I see is a student body that is ambivalent about learning, who care more about how long a paper needs to be than about the ideas presented within it. While we are succeeding in creating students capable of passing a standards based test, we are failing in our goal of creating life-long learners who think critically about the world around them and their place in it.
