Beef

I’ll accept the standardized exams because I expect my own kids to ace them. I’ll accept the data collection because this is the twenty-first century and to forgo data analysis on behalf of our students is to deny them one of the chief privileges and principal powers of modernity. I will accept explicit instruction because, in the end, it is still the teacher’s job to make things clear. I believe in reading skills because I believe I have them. No, if gripes were a meal, all of this would be little more than salad.

I’ll get used to this enormous edifice, poured from the same mold as prisons and sanitariums but still a home away from home. I’ll wince and endure the oddly-timed but evenly spaced electronic shrieks that go by the euphemism bells. I’ll make use of these sparse, never-were and loveless texts because I don’t need more than a sheet of loose-leaf to blow your mind. I’ll turn a blind eye to the absence of the enormous little niceties that make school bearable for all the squares: teams, clubs, dances, plays, bands, committees and all the frivolous accompaniments of grandeur.

I’ll accept the fact that it’s just a job. I’ll choose my battles and draw my lines in the sand. I admit my utility, and sympathize with the many uses to which my colleagues are put. I’ll go home at the end of the day, as if I lived in the suburbs. I’ll get real and be practical and do what I have to do.

So what’s my beef?

I’ll have to think about that.

Mr. Stickfigure is Back

Mr. Stickfigure is back, and more confused than ever. What the hell is it that I teach?

On the students’ report cards it says ENGLISH. On teacher programs it says ELA, short for English Language Arts. And according to a million pages of pedagogical confetti, I am a teacher of literacy. This last title will be my straw man for today. And believe me, this scarecrow is a fire hazard.

The New York State English Language Arts Exam is a devilish assessment. When I started teaching, a grizzled English vet said of the ELA, “And now they’ve made this fucking test that can’t be cheated!” Since he was the type of bilious, weary pessimist I flattered myself to despise at the time, it took me three years to see how right he was. That was when I spent my first week scoring the written portion of the ELA in the district office.

Scoring the ELA is a secure and ritualized affair. Official scorers are never within arms reach of the exam papers that come from their own school. Instead, they toil in small clusters, comparing the work of anonymous students to rubrics and anchor papers. After enough hours of scoring, you begin to feel the data moving through the computer part of your brain—the supercomputer part, the part that is the envy of the merely electronic device that scores the multiple-choice questions.

Human grey matter is the only computer than can perform the calculations necessary to score written exams. But make no mistake, it is calculation we perform, and our output is as pure as raw, binary data. All of this talk about the subjectivity of human scoring is based on a misunderstanding of scale. We marvel at the objective wonder of computer-aided assessment. What we are forgetting is that even computers can’t handle raw, binary data.

It takes an incredible amount of sophisticated redundancy to get a computer to reliably distinguish between A, B, C and D. The first million operations may be flawless, but before long, there’s a glitch. An electromagnetic surge, intermolecular friction, sunspots. A 1 becomes a 0 and a B becomes an A. The reality of data loss is actually what proves the wonder of our technology, which is over-engineered to withstand the loss. It is hard enough for a machine to master its ABCDs, which is precisely why we can’t trust an essay to an insentient computer.

Yes, when you score the written portion of the ELA, your emotions do occasionally swell and cloud judgment. You champion an iconoclast, give the benefit of the doubt to a kindred spirit, strike down a boastful persona. Occasionally it happens, and skews the results. Given the aggregate complexity of the calculations being performed, these subjective lapses amount to an acceptable margin of error. Meanwhile, the human scorer’s brain is leased for the processing of raw data.

After enough scoring, you begin to see the minds of the children behind the papers. More, you begin to see their classrooms, their teachers, their bulletin boards. You see their halls and their auditoriums. Finally, you see all of the way out onto the street and right back into their homes. Yes, these visions are colored by your personality and your prejudices. But when you score the ELA, you’re not judging homes and streets and halls. You’re not even judging classrooms or teachers or individuals. Your task is a simple as it can be made: Decide, on a scale of 1 to 4, to what extent the words on the page imply the students’ ability to express their reading comprehension in written form. And don’t let the generality of this description mystify you. If you’ve made it this far, you would score a 4 on the New York State ELA. It’s as simple as that.

For official scorers of the ELA, panoptic and panoramic visions of the educational landscape are a byproduct of our relentless computation. These images may exceed the margin of error, but they are enough to get a sense of the big picture. What they’ve done, like the old goat insisted, is make a test that tests how well you’re educated. Mr. Stickfigure is here to tell you that his astral presence has witnessed a hundred teachers try every trick in the book to raise their 1s and 2s to 3s and 4s. No dissection and reconstruction of the test and its peculiar format, no battery of last-minute strategies, no school, district, city or state-wide assault on the ELA itself will budge more than a few 1s and 2s. The only statistically reliable assurance of 3s and 4s is a good education.

Which is what makes literacy instruction so confusing to me. Suffice it to say that for teachers of 1s and 2s, the shadow of 3 and 4 looms large across our path. In this metaphor, it is the ELA itself that causes the eclipse. Knowing that light is on the other side, we stare into darkness and prepare our children for the night. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4, these are not labels, these are geography, community, family. But if all of this is the purview of literacy instruction, we are going to need a little more light to work with. We will have to come out from behind the ELA so that we can see just how much distance we’re expected to cover in 90 minutes.

The English Language Arts exam tests the art of living in the modern world. You can disagree with me, but the fact that you are here to do so speaks to my point. Would you trade your ability to read and disagree with me for a million dollars? No? Well, you’re a 4, you’ve got it made. You are wealthy in the currency of the language of power. If it is my job to transmit this wealth to my poor students, I’m going to need a lot more to invest in than the image of the ELA exam. I’ll trust the ELA to tell me when my students are 4s, but I don’t trust it to tell me how to get them there.

And yet the ELA has spoken to me with the intimacy of nerves and neurons about what should not be done. We should not treat our 1s and 2s as though they need to earn 3s and 4s on the ELA. We should treat them like we treat 3s and 4s. But 3s and 4s don’t come from English classrooms alone. Where they go to school, English classrooms must justify themselves despite the test. The mission of such schools and such classrooms is to pamper the intellects of their 3s and 4s, an assignment that calls for more than the gruel of remedial instruction. Our poor 1s and 2s live on nonfiction passages and 3-Step Methods, main ideas and processes of elimination, explicit instruction and leveled libraries.

The ELA exam accurately reflects the student’s general level of reading comprehension. If we don’t like what we see, I don’t understand why we keep staring into the mirror.