Peg Tyre is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who specializes in writing about education policy. In her 2008 book, The Trouble with Boys, she delved into the growing academic achievement gap between boys and girls to examine why boys are falling so far behind in the classroom. In her new book, The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids The Education They Deserve, Tyre mines education research data to find out which programs and strategies give kids the highest probabilities of academic success. The result is a concise handbook for parents, one that applies a macro-economic view of education in an effort to create a more rational market around school choice.
As another school year kicks off, Tyre has agreed to answer your questions about The Good School, and anything else education-related. So fire away in the comments section. Before you do, take a look at the table of contents from The Good School printed below, and also read Tyre’s adapted excerpt from the book on the merits (or lack thereof) of teaching to the test.
Read Peg Tyre’s answers to your questions, here.
Table of Contents:
Chapter One: The Preschool Scramble
Chapter Two: Testing
Chapter Three: Class Size
Chapter Four: Reading: What It Takes to Succeed
Chapter Five: When Mathematicians Get Angry
Chapter Six: The Right Balance
Chapter Seven: Teachers Matter
Chapter Eight: The Perfect School
What’s Really Wrong With Teaching to The Test
By Peg Tyre
For as long as there have been standardized tests, there have been people who’ve complained bitterly about instructors who teach to the test. But let’s ask ourselves: What’s wrong with that? I learned about the ancient Greeks in fifth grade. My teacher outlined his curriculum, and then gave us a test at the end of the year that consisted of harder and harder questions about those democracy and toga-loving people. Some of us did well, others less well. If your fifth grader is going to have to sit for a state mandated test on ancient Greeks, then it seems logical that the teacher should teach the material that he’ll be tested on.
But let’s take a closer look at the test itself. Since policy makers want to keep the test brief so that it’s easy and inexpensive to score, maybe they’ll choose three questions about, say, the formation of democracy. What do those questions consist of? One approach would be to ask three questions that reflect an increasingly more sophisticated grasp of those ideas. With this kind of test, each answer the child provides would help determine a two-pronged question: do these middle-schoolers know about the formation of democracy in ancient Greece? And how well do they know it?
But that’s not how standardized tests work. When state education authorities want to find out if your child knows a particular standard, they hire a group of test assessment professionals – mostly researchers and statisticians with a background in education. These test builders use chunks of the course material to fashion their questions. But the question or questions will never be able to test the depth of kids’ knowledge. It’s not meant to. Test builders design questions with one aim: to have roughly 40 to 60 percent of students answer it correctly. When they get those results, the test builders believe that the test question is a legitimate proxy for the material the kids learned. Why this quirky criteria? According to their statistical models, somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of kids are likely to understand any given material. So when they ask a question and about 40 to 60 percent get it right, it is (in the land of standardized testing) a legitimate, statistically defensible question.
If you can hold that in your mind, then teaching to the test starts to seem like a very bad idea. Standardized test questions are being pulled from the lower part of the middle range of what kids should be able to do. If teachers at a school are encouraged to “teach to the test,” they can probably show you test scores that are going up, but that means they are focusing instruction in the most basic part of the material. And that is not a particularly ambitious goal for a school.
The other and slightly more subtle problem with teaching to the test is that it disrupts the natural distribution of correct answers. If the teacher teaches to the test, all the kids might answer the question correctly. But remember, answering the question itself was not the point – it was just a small chunk of course material acting as a proxy for a bigger chunk of course material. And if a teacher successfully gets all kids to answer a test question correctly, it moves from a good, valid question to being statistical “noise.”
Which doesn’t stop schools from encouraging teachers to shape their instruction around getting kids to score well on tests. These days, standardized test scores are being used for far more than they were ever intended—schools with poor test scores are being reorganized, while teachers who can produce high test scores are being given more pay. And politicians (I’m talking to you, Michael Bloomberg) are making rising tests scores part of their political campaign. The corruption of this delicate and specific form of measurement, most experts believe, is almost inevitable.
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Any thoughts on the current state of textbooks.
I recently looked through my child’s high school physics textbook. It seemed to be designed to be all things to all people (from advanced to the “phyics”-challenged). It had all sorts of distracting side-bars, readiness pre-sections, test-prep post-sections … It was difficult to find the actual physics. And this made the book much too heavy.
Meanwhile, across the Pacific, that textbook would be an inexpensive paperback of about 200 pages and the students would learn more and do better.
What should have been done with a troubled/gifted case like myself?
In “knowledge bowl” I could as a HS freshman beat our 5 best students by myself. I would stay up drinking and partying the night before a standardized test, sleep through half of it, and still get perfect scores. But I also grew up on the poor side of town and was being raised by a drunk single parent. So I had a ton of attitude and behavioral problems. I had zero discipline and only wanted to learn and get laid. I refused to jump through hoops.
My sophomore year one teacher mentioned going to college instead of the staying in HS, but no one tried to convince me to do so, and I did not do it because I didn’t want to be separated from my girlfriend/friends/hockey buddies. So I stayed in a HS and got a 2.3 GPA and the best test scores they ever saw.
As a result no good universities wanted to take a chance on me. After a year in the real world I sucked it up and went to state university X. It was a good experience and I got good grades, but my attitude problems were not entirely gone (I refused to kiss ass) and no amount of excelling at state university X will give you the life prospects that the networking at elite school Y provides.
I sit at 30, with a decent upper middle class job, but with a work history that involves taking orders from many people who whose decision makings skills and intellect are a joke. I could have done interesting/demanding/valuable work, instead I have mostly diverted that energy to maximizing my own happiness, reading, and playing strategy games with a few gifted friends.
I have greatly enjoyed many parts of my life, so I am not sure I *regret* my decisions, though in retrospect a lot of them were extremely poor (I am pretty sure I could have got a 4.0 in HS and gone to whatever university I chose if I had I done 1 hour of BS work every day during time I instead focused on learning as much as possible).
There has got to be a better way to handle gifted kids then that right? Even with behavioral problems? Having me take classes from teachers who knew less about the subjects then me just exacerbated the problems and instilled a permanent lack of respect for authority, which while often warranted, is 99% of the time detrimental.
Anyway please tell me there is a better way? I would hate for my children to go through the same things I did.
Why is it that given the Female dominance in performance in the educational field that schools continue to ignore the essential physical exertion boys need?
How is it that boys even survive in an environment where they are taught by people who don’t know what it is like to be a boy (mostly women in primary education) and are teaching using a style that is grossly discriminatory against their learning interests?
I’ve read your rationale for why ‘teaching to the test’ is bad, but lets agree that the testing is going to stick around and teachers and school systems will continue to be judged by test results. More of the masses are happy with this configuration than others available. They want a tool to be able to develop critical thought about their local school system and the teachers in it. How do we improve the system? Do we develop the test differently? Do we grade the test differently, collectively. Do we grade the test differently between communities (based on socio-economic factors, for instance)?
Being a sophomore in high school and the son of parents who immigrated from India, it’s easy to see that my parents fall in to the typical “Asian Parent,” stereotype stressing education over everything else, and, it hasn’t failed me yet (I’m proud to say that I’m a straight A student). But, my question is, what makes Asian parents so apt to push their children to the extent that there’s a stereotype on Asian children being smarter than their Caucasian classmates? Is it the education system in Asia or something else?
I’m a physicist with several degrees and an extensive background in math, but always had a lot of trouble in grade school, middle school, and high school, with math and science classes. In my field, I have lots of friends and colleagues who’ve had similar problems as I’ve had, and have told me in detail about their school experiences. It’s always the same story, and always leads me to the same conclusion: teachers are incompetent.
More times than I can individually recall, as a student, I asked basic questions that the teachers simply could not answer. I was given explanations that were misleading or incorrect. I asked “what can I use this to do?” and they didn’t know (which happens with alarming frequency, given that math and science is so pervasive, they could just pick something at random and it would be a correct answer!) Teachers just do not know the basics of their subjects.
It seems to me everyone discussing how education can be improved misses this point. It doesn’t matter how much money your school has, how many “teaching methods” your teachers know, how many conferences on different “learning styles” they have attended, or anything else. It’s all for nothing if they don’t know the subject!
Why do our students fail at math?
They aren’t taught by mathematicians.
Why do our students fail at science?
They aren’t taught by scientists.
It’s shocking to me that people would suggest these subjects be taught by anyone other than mathematicians or scientists! In my entire education carrier before college, I did not meet one teacher with an MS or PhD, and most who had BSes (well, BAs) had them not in the subject they were teaching, but in education.
People try to suggest that, at a grade/middle/high school level, you don’t really need actual experts to teach. Well, yeah, to teach the garbage that’s taught now you don’t; to do it right, you definitely do! (I’m an expert, I know!!)
The question people should be asking (but aren’t) is:
What can we do to attract actual experts to teaching?
My question is:
Why aren’t people asking this obvious question?
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Jeremy, teachers are not necessarily experts (or even proficient) in their fields because they are required to have degrees, or be credentialed, in “Education.” I remember new teachers complaining because they were being tested in their subject area – on a high school level! (I don’t remember what state this was and it was some time ago…I don’t know if teachers now are tested upon college graduation). You’d think a teacher could pass a *college-level* exam in English or Math or whatever their field of teaching.
My suspicion is that the required credentialing was established by the Teachers’ Unions, to keep out anyone who might want to teach, have a degree in a particular field, but not a degree in “Education.” Seems like a good way to keep up the herd mentality.
I don’t think tests are in and of themselves bad; doctors, lawyers and accountants all must pass their respective licensing exams – which are NOT easy tests. Doctors must also pass a test for their specialty and re-test every seven or so years. But there is too much riding on those elementary school exams – closing schools, getting/losing funding, teacher promotions, etc. There is too much incentive to manipulate things, so that even the poor tests that are out there are just about the worst way to measure student achievement.
As the saying goes, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” It is well known that education students are the absolute bottom of the academic barrel with those who continue on to grad school typically having lower math scores on the GRE than the English majors and lower English scores than the engineering students. Elementary education in particular is a common “MRS” degree for women with no scholastic ambition but who “like kids”.
Its about money. If you invest the time,funds, and effort to get an advanced degree why would you take the pittance most schools offer teacher’s. If teacher’s salaries aren’t commiserate with the work that the do then why would the best and the brightest want to become teachers. Those who can do those who can teach
@Brad
You nailed it. I started as an Education major, to teach math. But I quickly realized that even if I made a 4.0 IN MATH I would still get the same $24k/yr as the pot-head next to me with all C’s. What’s the point?
So I switched to business/banking. I hate banking, but at least I get paid for my skill set.
Exactly, Brad. In the “old” days, teaching was one of the few professions open to intelligent career-oriented women. When the barriers came down, the smartest women flooded into higher-paying professions that were previously closed to them – doctors, lawyers, scientists, etc., most all of which are higher-paying than teaching. That left a second-tier of graduates in teaching (speaking in general terms, of course; there are genuinely smart and effective teachers out there), probably mainly due to the lower pay available.
Teaching became part of the “pink-collar ghetto” for women, who STILL typically make less than men. With the “brain drain” from teaching, the status fell and thus the pay never caught up with what it should be. It would be great if teaching offered competitive salaries – AND had controls in place so that the best and brightest could be retained while shedding the poor performers. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to truly measure teacher effectiveness. I think standardized tests are not the right way, but the effects of good teaching are generally quite hard to pinpoint and may take a long time to become evident.
Jeremy, the best, the *very best* thing a teacher can do is to admit when they do not know something, and *then* offer to help the student find the answer. In my AP Calculus class in high school, I was baffled by epsilon-delta arguments, and no matter how often I asked, my teacher was unable to say, “It’s a game: You pick an epsilon, and I guarantee I can find a delta, no matter how small your epsilon is.” It wasn’t until my undergraduate Analysis class when I “got” it.
There’s no reason we have to have an expert teaching every class if we have good pedagogy for the questions that go beyond what the educator is prepared for.
2 questions:
1) Looking back, what would say have been the greatest accomplishments and failures of the No Child Left Behind Act?
2) How important is early childhood education? What kind of change would we see if every child got 1-2 years of structured instructional time before entering kindergarten?
To what extent do you think parents have the ability to chose the right school for their kids? Specifically, for families living in poverty that often face bigger social and economic constraints, how much of a choice do parents of these families actually have?