The 'Receptivity Factor'

By Davy McClay

As an educator, I feel glad when I hear our new president vowing to be the "champion of education." Prospects of a large budget surplus have enabled him, as well as his predecessor and his opponent in the recent presidential election, to engage in some previously unheard-of rhetoric in this area. Sharing in the possibilities they have outlined has been exciting. Up to a point. It appears now that a big part of the programs being promoted will involve holding us teachers more "accountable." While I'm very much in favor of accountability, defining it in terms of my students' test scores is problematic.

Test scores provide generalized indicators of how students are doing and where parents and teachers need to put their focus to ensure maximum benefit for each child. To politicians, though, test scores offer a nice, simple bottom line. They have fallen in love with test scores as a quick and easy measure of classroom effectiveness. Yet no reputable educational researcher would back wholeheartedly any claims that normative tests such as the Stanford Achievement Test-9th Edition, used here in California, are valid and reliable measures of "classroom learning." Spokespersons for the test publishers might claim that their products are "the best," but that dodges the question.

The metaphor undergirding our belief that teachers are accountable for students' test scores is one from the world of business. Test scores are supposedly our "product" in education. But, to stretch that metaphor just a bit, the material we are given for production lacks any quality control. How raw or un-raw the material may be when it comes to us is anybody's guess. Likewise, any changes that may occur with a child's "rawness factor" during the course of a year...