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Pforzheimer Professor Susan Moore Johnson is a faculty member in the Administration, Planning, and Social Policy area at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Jane Buchbinder, editor of Ed. magazine, conducted this interview with Johnson on the implications of the high-stakes testing movement on classroom practice and teacher retention.
Susan Moore Johnson: High stakes tests have made people uncertain about what the right approach to teaching outght to be and what the effects of assessment really are. It's clear that resources—whether they are teaching expertise or buildings that function well or technology—are very unequally distributed. Because of the way we fund public education and the reliance on property tax, the inequities are absurd in a number of places. That translates into poor performance and limited life opportunities for children. So not only the reallocation of resources—which comes with many of these high-stakes tests and assessment—but also the focus of the attention of the public and educators on performance could arguably serve kids well. At the same time, the transition is so abrupt that we are placing high stakes on kids who have not had what they need to do well. There are many people who believe that it is possible to have a really good assessment that would guide teaching and learning in meaningful ways and that would serve children well. But the rapid transitions from no expectations or from totally idiosyncratic expectations to high expectations with high stakes make it very difficult to support it fully. There are, at either end of the spectrum, testing advocates or opponents but I think there are also many other people who think it might be a good idea if it were done well. Jane Buchbinder: What have been the tangible changes in classroom practice brought on by high-stakes tests?
Johnson: What we found in our interviews in Massachusetts is that new teachers, and I suspect this is true nationwide, are inclined to be assigned to the grades that are being tested because experienced teachers don't want the pressure. The quick interpretation is that they are afraid to be judged. But in fact many of them say that they know how they want to teach a particular subject and the tests put so much pressure on them to cover certain material in a particular period of time that they would rather not have to teach that grade. The hysteria grows in the tenth grade and everybody is worried about what the tenth grade teachers are teaching, as if somehow the earlier grades weren't contributing to the students' current knowledge. New teachers are entering this scene with great uncertainty and confusion. In this state and many other states, the tests, the textbooks, and the curriculum are not aligned, so if you follow the curriculum and use the textbook, it doesn't necessarily mean that the questions on the test would be addressed in the teaching. There's very little support for new teachers in general right now as they enter teaching because we haven't been hiring new teachers for such a long period of time. Basically, the last generation of teachers is mine. We were hired in the late sixties and early seventies and that cohort of people, for the most part, remained teachers for their entire careers. If you look at the distribution, there's a big bulge about to retire and then a fairly flat line and then a growing number of novice teachers. Public schools have not developed a good way of supporting new teachers as they enter the classroom, so not only do these folks lack that kind of organized structured support to help them learn how to teach and how to teach a particular group of kids, but they're also now encountering these very frightening demands.
The old curriculum is no longer working because it has to adjust to the new standards and assessments and so new teachers are left not knowing what to teach, not knowing how to teach, and feeling that they are pretty much on their own. We've interviewed teachers who developed their curriculum by first reading test questions on the Internet and then inferring what they should be teaching and how they should be teaching it. One of our respondents said she felt "lost at sea" and I think there are large numbers of teachers who feel the pressure of the assessments, who have a tremendous responsibility to the students and yet don't have either the curricular or the mentoring support to know how to do well. I think from the perspective of new teachers, that's the problem right now. [View the findings of a related research study from the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers] Buchbinder: People have probably already heard the statistic that we are about to have a teacher shortage of approximately two million teachers. Why is that happening? Johnson: There is a whole story about the need for new teachers that has to do with a number of factors: growing enrollments, increasing immigration, policy changes in things like class size that require more teachers, wholesale retirement of people in their mid- to late fifties, and the attrition of people who enter and then leave the profession because the working conditions are poor or they feel that they have no prayer of succeeding with kids. We are only just beginning in the northeast to contend with this. Because of policy changes in the southwest, California changed its class-size limitations from 40 down to 20 in grades K-3. Suddenly, they doubled the number of teachers that they needed in those grades, and they experienced an incredible shortage. The shortage is very uneven. It hits urban areas in particular, and very poor schools within urban areas. And then certain subjects are especially problematic: math, science, bilingual, and special education. There is unevenness regionally, but then you have the migration of teachers who move from one school to another because there are lots of openings and if they are dissatisfied with where they are, they move. Those districts that are experiencing these migrations out are, again, the poorest districts. Those are the kids most likely to be hit hardest by the assessments and they have the least stable teaching force working with them. In addition, you have this curriculum problem and materials problem where, even if the teachers wanted to do a good job, they wouldn't have what they need to do it.
Experienced teachers are encountering something different. Often, they have particular curriculum units or approaches to teaching which they think are very effective in developing students as lifelong learners or developing appreciations for creativity that the standardized tests really may not get at. They are increasingly finding that they have to give up certain units or approaches because of the material they have to cover in the elite suburban schools (but also urban schools and any places that have innovative curriculum). You hear stories from teachers about things that they had to give up that they loved and had done for years. Buchbinder: Things that they had seen work? Johnson: Yes. Now, it may well be true that if the tests are good and the teaching is good, the students will do well. You see that in the test scores of children—maybe in the suburban schools where, because of socioeconomics, they can be expected to do well—they seem to do well on tests without a lot of test preparations or pressure. We don't yet know whether those special units were just precious things that the teachers felt were effective or whether you can use the tests to really get at thinking and problem solving in meaningful ways. One of the good things about the Massachusetts set-up is that people in schools will tell you that they get good data back about their kids. They don't get it soon enough but they get information about where their school is doing well and where it's having difficulties. I think in general people feel much more satisfied and confident about the elementary assessments and the information that they get back and the opportunity that they have in subsequent years to address it. Where people are feeling real pain is at the secondary level. There's very limited support for teachers as they try to find out what they are supposed to do with those children. The notion that all they need is tutors is absurd. It's so much deeper than that. Buchbinder: What about the states in which the tests don't come with the necessary materials? Johnson: What you get is lists of topics or sometimes sequences. It doesn't tell you how to teach quadratic equations, for example, but you may know that they are tested so you find a chapter from a book that will help you figure out how to do that. I'm not saying that everyone is totally at a loss but only in public education would we set these high standards and give people very few resources and very little support to figure out what to do. Schools and districts are struggling because they know people need help but they don't have the resources to do the kind of in-class professional development, the mentoring that the new teachers need.
At some level, teachers need access to curriculum that is specified in enough detail that they can rely on it but they are not bound by it. They are not looking for recipes about exactly what to do every moment. Buchbinder: Are new teachers either losing their jobs or leaving their jobs because they don't feel like they are successful? Johnson: The attrition rate of new teachers is very high. And the migration rates are also very, very high. People leave for a variety of reasons but, fundamentally, it is because people can't do the work that they thought they could do. If they feel that they are failing their kids and not getting the satisfaction that they sought, they're likely to leave but it's not clear since the assessments are such a new thing. Buchbinder: Is it clear people are retiring in part because of the tests? Johnson: That's the word but I don't know that for sure. It's certainly what newspapers say, that "this work isn't what I came for so therefore I am leaving." I would say the new teachers both who enter teaching as a new career and those who come from other lines of work—that's a substantial percentage—now believe that accountability is a good thing and that it's the responsibility of teachers to serve their kids in ways that produce good outcomes, or measurable outcomes. But I think they expect that the institution would be better organized to help them be able to do that. Buchbinder: Is any sort of help, of professional development coming with the tests? Johnson: No, it's sort of coming after the tests in the sense that districts are trying to figure out what they need and then they try to say which curriculum may be professionally developed. For example, Boston has this year adopted the TERC math curriculum, which is very good and very challenging. That means that people are supposed to change from whatever other curriculum they had. The new teachers will welcome it this year because there will be training that goes with it. They may do the training this year and then in four years the new teachers will know how to make it work. There is good curriculum out there, but training is expensive and some places are not doing it at all.
The U.S. is very peculiar in not having some sort of leaving exam. Other countries don't do a lot of testing of kids. We do a lot more of it but they have some national standards for graduation. For a long time, the curriculum in Japan or Australia or France has been geared toward the outcomes that are widely agreed upon professionally. In the U.S., because of local control and local funding, we have this incredibly atomized set of expectations that for the most part we've never tested. We have typically tested kids younger and then relied on the SAT to give us some indication of what was happening in high school. I think we've begun to develop standards as a response to increasing globalization. Other countries have very clearly specified curricula, and tests to assess how they do. The Japanese curriculum is a slim book. It's not very detailed but there is a consensus about what should be taught and when and how. We have none of that agreement in this country except in very broad ways, like in what year you teach algebra or geometry. I think partly there is a recognition that, for the sake of the country, we needed to set standards and have students achieve. In the broadest ways, the idea behind this initiative makes a great deal of sense: high expectations, shared standards, and a very sophisticated assessment. We're just not there yet to be able to say we have the curriculum and the instruction and the assessment that will ensure that the kids do well. For More Information
HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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