If you ask me, it’s getting way out of hand. I am no stranger to standardized testing. My family moved at the most every two years. It seemed as though I would take the assessment test at my old school, then move to a new state and start a new school just in time to participate in their standardized test. But, like many from my generation, I survived. I don’t know how well I scored on the tests, though I’m sure my mother has the reports around somewhere. We did not dwell on the material in the tests in our classes. I remember getting advice on test taking from my teachers: “get a good night’s sleep” “have a good breakfast” “bring an extra pencil.” That was it.

So when the latest article on standardized testing came out, I found myself behind approximately 98% of the contents. Specifically, this paragraph almost made me cheer:

The obvious cure in Illinois, and in other states, is to carefully limit or dispense with test preparation in class. Teachers should instead be working on the high-level academic skills that students need to perform well, not just on tests, but in college and long afterward.

I think it’s obvious that there is too much time spent on testing preparation. Honestly, I have to admit that when it’s in print in the New York Times, though, I do a little happy dance. Why? It’s getting attention outside the educational sphere. This means that the non-educator citizen is starting to pay attention. So, I say thank you, to the New York Times. I thank all of the parents who have called and complained that their child should not fail a math test for bubbling in the wrong answer when they have the work to show that they got the answer write. I applaud the parent able to de-stress their child by not stressing out over the test at home. I applaud the teachers who do not dwell on the test preparation in their classroom. I applaud Carl Chew for standing up for what was right.

Writing…the Black Sheep of the Curriculum?

I do not, however, applaud the New York Times for the ideas they put forth in the opening paragraph of their essay:

To get the well-educated, highly skilled workers that the country needs, states must strengthen public school curriculums, especially in math and science. States also need to adopt high-quality tests that show how students are performing from year to year.

Unfortunately, the New York Times has jumped on the bandwagon of bettering education without looking at the whole picture. If we are going to strengthen public school currriculums, it needs to be done across the board not “especially in math and science.” I spend a good portion of my summer grading writing placement tests and I have to say that each year, the results seem to get even more dismal. In addition to placing more students into basic writing classes because they cannot write to college standards, I hear more complaints from parents about the placement, get more pressure from administration to not place these students in basic writing and continue to grow more annoyed with the entire system. The problem with placing students in basic writing is two fold. It’s a result of bad PR for basic writing and it’s a result of less writing curriculum in the high schools.

Basic Writing (Read “Remedial Writing” to Parents and Students) is for Dummies

The biggest problem with Basic Writing is the bad PR it has gotten over the past few decades. Few schools offer this class as a credit class, which means the students enrolled in the class are paying for a class that does not in any way count towards the credit hours they need for their degree. Writing instruction in this class often begins with writing paragraphs and graduates to writing a full essay. For this reason, students who are placed in basic writing (and their parents by default) see this class as a course for remedial students or Second Language students. They feel that since they passed all of their English courses in high school and did not fail the Written portion of the Standardized Test, this is not the place for them. Unfortunately, this can create a very hostile learning environment for some students.

AP students are the worst in a Basic Writing class. This is largely because they enter into AP classes in high school with the preconceived notion that passing the AP test clears them from all need to take college writing and that if they don’t pass it, they certainly won’t be placed in Basic Writing.

The High School Writing Curriculum

In many high schools, writing is not actually part of the curriculum. Now, I don’t want to generalize, because I have seen several schools that do a great job of incorporating writing into their English classes. However, for the most part, writing instruction seems to simply involve

“Write an essay discussing the symbolism in [enter novel name here]“

When the student turns in the essay, they receive comments on whether or not they interpreted the symbolism appropriately, used MLA correctly, and used correct grammar. Unfortunately, I have found that too often writing instruction beyond these small areas consists of

• An essay has five paragraphs (introduction, 3 body paragraphs, conclusion)

• A thesis statement goes at the end of the introduction and is constructed as such: “In [the novel's name], [Author's name] uses symbolism to [item one, item two, and item three]

That’s about all it seems that my students know about writing. Even when they place into our traditional Composition I class, they don’t have the information to write a persuasive essay of any form. They can inform until the semester is over, but they can’t persuade an audience. In fact, most of them are never introduced to the ideas of writing to an audience. So it bothers me even more to see writers from the New York Times pushing for improvement in math and science curriculums.

Preconceived Notions of Writing

I think the biggest problem with writing curriculum and students’ disinterest in their writing classes comes from being in a field that they don’t believe will use writing. Over the last few years, I have heard more students say “I don’t need writing in my career, I’m going to be a [insert career here].” I’ve heard this from disciplines across the university, including:

• Business students
  • “My job is about numbers and management, not writing”
• History majors planning to attend law school
  • “I’ll have a clerk who will do my writing for me”
• Nurses
  • “All the writing that we do is notes that appear in charts”
• Chemistry
  • “I’m going to find a cure for cancer, I don’t need to know how to write.”
• Theater
  • “I’m an actor, writing isn’t my job.”
• Art
  • “I say it with paint, not words.”

I could go on and on with the disciplines, but I’ll leave it here. I’m not compiling a laundry list. I don’t know where they get the idea that their specific career is not one that requires writing, but I would love to see more emphasis on this in the curriculum. No matter how much I remind students that they will have to write in their discipline, they seem to brush it off as something their English teacher said. I don’t know anything about their discipline because I’m not part of it.

There’s a problem with the entire system. From not teaching students to write well in high school to the preconceived notions that they don’t need to write. Everything that gets done in this world today is in some way connected to a necessary document. Law students become clerks before they become lawyers. Even as lawyers, they still have to write briefs. Business students have to write proposals. Actors have to apply for jobs and those applications sometimes involve a cover letter.

In short, we need to change writing instruction now. We cannot afford to wait for another generation to slip through the cracks.  Please, teachers, start stressing how important writing is to the subject you teach. Kids need to know. If you teach English, move beyond the five-paragraph essay. If you’re a student, look into your career and see what kind of writing is going to be required; I think you would be surprised. If you or your child gets placed in a Basic Writing class, work with it. There are lots of things that you can learn from this class. I promise, it is not a remedial class. It is designed to aid you in becoming a better writer.

I’m worried now for multiple reasons. I want to start with the testing itself. A few weeks ago I, along with my FYC colleagues, received an email saying that ACT representatives would be administering the CAAP (Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency) to all of our FYC classes. I paid no notice because, since I teach Basic Writing, my students would not be tested. Now, over the past few weeks I’ve heard the horror stories of teachers waiting for the officials to show up for the class, having to reschedule class plans and just be generally annoyed with the entire process. I said nothing. I’m not an advocate of standardized testing in college (or anywhere else, really), but these were not my issues. Yet today, I got an email that seemed just a little bit ludicrous. Apparently, the tests were not only given to FYC students, but also to our senior class. The senior class, it seems, rebelled. So the school’s response is not to just shrug their shoulders and go on, but to bribe students who did not take the test in their classes. By bribe, I really mean bribe. They are willing to pay these students (via a raffle) to take the test. It seems they promised ACT that a specific number of seniors would take the test and they have to meet that quota. So now the students they are attracting are not necessarily made up of a true sampling of our senior class, but will be made up partially of those who are seeking a “reward” for some kind of participation. It seems to me that this will, ultimately, throw off our sample pool.

The reason this worries me is that since our state is considering mandatory assessment. I have a strange feeling that these “experimental” tests are to help decide if this issue should become a law in the state. This means that instead of seeing what our school is doing, they are seeing how far students who need an extra few dollars in their pocket can be assessed. This sample in no way will reflect the student body graduating this year and, therefore, we run the risk of having to cater to the content of mandatory testing because a few people wanted to earn some extra money.

Still, I have not answered the overlying question of why I am against mandatory testing. Well, that all goes back to my teaching experience. I teach in a college where students not only must have specific SAT scores (1000 on the verbal and math) or a 21 composite ACT score. Truthfully, I would have just squeaked into the school as a Freshman. But that score is only valid if the student has also passed the state exit exam. I took an assessment test at the end of my junior year in high school and I did fine. But it was not a mandatory test at that time. Now, with the mandatory assessment, teachers focus too much energy on preparing students to pass the test and too little on teaching them what they need to know. When I was in high school, the test was poo-pooed as just an “experiment” so our teachers did not focus on the content of the test as the basis for our class syllabus. Now, however I spend the first few weeks of FYC teaching students that the 5-paragraph essay is not a form carved in stone–a concept they generally don’t comprehend until midterms. In addition, I have to teach them that a thesis statement does not have to specifically include the topic statement and the statement of the three topics in their essay. I have students in my class who didn’t score well enough on the state test to be placed into traditional FYC classes, but are brilliant writers. They’re in my class because they can’t write a 5 paragraph essay. Sure, I have students who can’t write a paragraph, but the majority of these students are working with problems traditionally addressed in our regular FYC classes. They feel that they are “bad” writers because they couldn’t write the 5 paragraph essay. What makes them “bad” writers–and this is not just the Basic Writing students, but a majority of our incoming freshmen, is that they don’t know what a topic sentence is and they can’t identify a thesis statement in any form other than the one they were taught to write in high school. They don’t know what plagiarism is and they can’t use any style manual to cite a reference. They don’t know these things because they weren’t emphasized in high school–they weren’t on the state test.

Now I swore that I would not make this post a “back in my day” rant, but I know that my high school English teacher would never have let us out of her class if we didn’t know the basics to writing. The basics, in her mind, included a full understanding of MLA, topic sentences, complex thesis statements, and 7-15 paragraph essays. There are times in class when I’m thinking that I’m teaching things in class that I would expect students to have learned in high school. I can’t be mad at them for not knowing this class, and, to some extent I can’t be mad at the teachers who are doing what they are told to do–prepare the students for the test. But I’m worried. What I’m worried about is that we’re going to be sending students into the real world with too much attention on what needs to be learned to pass an assessment test and not what they need to know in the real world. In other words, I’m worried that some day, somewhere, an accountant will be teaching a new secretary that they do not use the five-paragraph format in the real world.

That is my worry. And if we keep bribing students to take an “experimental test” I fear that is where we will be in the next decade. If that happens, I may hang up my PowerPoints and handouts and run for office. This state could use a former teacher as a governor. Why not me? I will be able to write more than the five paragraph essay.