This list represents only a fraction of the ways my school addresses the myriad needs of a diverse campus community. Yet many of the items above address the affective, emotional needs of the student population and none of them is taken into consideration by the state when it evaluates our “success” as educators. Instead the state focuses on California’s two mandated, high-stakes tests. And though our pass rate on one—the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE)—ranks with any school in our area and is at about the state average, and our score on the other—the STAR—is consistently in the top third of the state, we are in danger of being officially labeled a “failing school” because our Academic Performance Index (API) score has not continued to rise* ("The API is a school performance measurement system first developed as part of California's 1999 Public Schools Accountability Act. The API is currently calculated using only the Stanford 9 or STAR test) (Great Schools). But whether we manage to avoid the official label or not, the rhetoric of state and federal politicians and the media in general consistently decries the deplorable state of our educational system. Over and over we hear that the state’s schools graduate students who lack basic skills and are not ready for the job market or for college.
The solution of course is a federally mandated program of tests and the threat of the “failing school” label. The rationale behind this is interesting. Though nearly everyone, conservative and liberal alike, agrees education is under-funded and schools lack the resources our students need, the current thinking seems to be that if we tie what little funding there is to test scores and make graduation dependent on a test, both teachers and students will try harder and be more successful despite the lack of resources. Thus the state expects rising API scores in a time of educational crisis where slashed education spending leaves class size reduction, essential support services, art and music programs, and the jobs of thousands of young, energetic teachers specifically trained in the new state standards by the wayside. Yet as the money for these resources evaporates there is money for remediation, test preparation classes, and test preparation materials.
Many of my older colleagues shrug off these turbulent times. This too shall pass, they say. Yet not so long ago, I recall an emphasis on student-centered learning and teachers as “guides on the side,” serious discussions about multi-modal instruction, learning styles and multiple intelligences. Clearly these buzz words of recent pedagogical history represent a political agenda which has now been replaced (much as my colleagues assure me the current agenda will be in time). This is true I’m sure; we live in a changeable world, but can we afford to wait? What I embraced about that outmoded agenda, and what seems to be disappearing from the current climate, is a focus on the needs of the student, a focus on learning. As universities, employers, administrators, and politicians pound the pulpit in favor of ever higher standards and “objective accountability,” what has become of the student? In an ever more standardized system, where do the unique, affective needs of the individual fit in? As an English teacher, and especially as a teacher of writing, I must question the long term ramifications of our current course. Things are changing in our classrooms, and we must ask ourselves whether these changes truly meet the needs, not of bureaucrats, but of the students who count on us to defend their interests as learners. I cannot address the whole school system, or even just my school. Both tasks are daunting in their scope. However, I can track the changes in my own small department and my own classroom, and ask: What effect is the focus on standardized testing having on the teaching of writing and, more importantly, the learning of writing in the high school classroom?
My experience with high school writing instruction began in 1997 when I first stepped on campus as a naive student teacher. Back then the talk was all about standards and benchmarks. The California State Language Art Standards had been announced, the NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) had released standards, and at the high school teachers had just finished crafting local standards. For a young teacher, this focus on standards was a boon. The list of genres the department taught, in what year and in what course, was codified in a clear and widely accepted set of benchmarks. Ninth graders could be counted on to have studied thesis-driven, analytical writing and beginning research papers. Tenth graders worked through controversial issue papers, persuasive writing, and more formal research papers. Eleventh graders wrote an I-search. In composition classes, students wrote a minimum of five formal papers each semester, taking each through the full writing process, and at the end of the year, these papers were gathered into a portfolio of work demonstrating that the student had met (or failed to meet) the department benchmarks. For a young teacher struggling to keep my head above water anyway, the sheer quantity of paper work and reading was a struggle, but at least I knew what to teach and what the department priorities were.
At this same time, the high school was making two other important changes. Acknowledging the work load of composition teachers at all levels and the attention such a comprehensive writing program requires, our district agreed to cap all composition classes at twenty-five students (down from thirty-three), and, in conjunction with the state, reduced class size to twenty in the ninth grade. To put the magnitude of this shift into perspective, imagine a class of thirty-three students. Each student turns in a first draft essay which an experienced teacher reads and responds to in about ten minutes. This equates to roughly 330 minutes of reading time for just that draft in just that class. Let us assume that, in addition to other forms of response, the teacher reads and grades one more draft of this paper in about half as long as the first draft. This adds another 165 minutes for a total of 495 minutes of reading time. Now, assume that this teacher teaches all five required essays in sophomore composition, a single semester course. That is 2475 minutes of reading time per semester, not including planning classes and grading day-to-day assignments, for this one section of composition. Assuming this same teacher teaches three sections of composition, his or her reading load for these classes alone (not including his or her other two sections or planning and day-to-day grading time) is roughly 7425 minutes or 123 hours and 45 minutes per semester. In other words, responding to papers for these three classes alone would take more than three forty-hour work weeks, every moment of which is outside of class time. In class, this teacher would have approximately 1.7 minutes to spend with each of his or thirty-three young writers each day. At twenty-five to one the numbers are somewhat less dismal. Our hypothetical teacher would now spend only 93 hours and 45 minutes reading formal essays and would have fully 2.2 minutes to spend with each student per day. Even in this smaller class, to accomplish ten-minute writing conferences with each student on a given paper would require four and a half 55-minute periods, assuming each conference was exactly ten minutes and the teacher did not have to take any time out for classroom management. A teacher who wanted to conference with students on each paper would use at least five weeks of the sixteen-week semester on writing conferences alone. Up class size to thirty-three and the same teacher would spend six weeks conferencing. These numbers point to two things. One, constructing and implementing a formal writing program is time consuming even with smaller class size, and two, even in such a program, the individual writer receives far too little one-on-one time with the writing instructor. Clearly, the fewer students in a class, the more attention each student receives, both in class and in response to his/her writing. For this reason small class size is the lynch-pin of a successful writing program.
Another learner-centered practice making inroads in my student-teaching year was integration. All over campus teams of teachers were integrating curriculum, sharing students, and sharing grading. One example had a science teacher, English teacher, and history teacher sharing sixty-six students in back to back periods. In this arrangement composition became a focus in all three classrooms, not just English, and writing standards and instruction could be shared. In those first few years, these supportive teams of teachers multiplied from two teams serving approximately 132 freshman on campus, to at least six teams serving more than 250 students of all levels. The first two teams were focused specifically on providing support for incoming ninth-graders and were intended as a pilot program for integrated teams throughout the freshman year.
My classroom at this time was all about project-based learning and writers workshop. For much of the day I taught in a program integrating English with world history and math for ninth-graders, and for the rest I taught mostly sophomore composition, serving roughly 115 students a day. In my ninth grade classes, my students wrote their benchmark papers as part of larger projects on Black History, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust. In the tenth-grade classes I designed units around the writing process, moving from one genre to another over the course of the semester, reading and writing in each. In both courses I did not grade student writing, rather I marked papers on a continuum measuring student progress in all facets of writing. The emphasis was on process and growth rather than product. I taught grammar, as the rest of the department did, in context as a revision skill.
Since then, in a span of only five years, the focus of the state and of my department has shifted dramatically. Local standards and benchmarks are a thing of the past, replaced by a fanatical focus on the state standards. This started slowly with the arrival of the state-mandated STAR test, a test most in the department ignored initially. Funding and focus shifted away from local standards and as they were less supported they dwindled. It has been years since any teacher in my department put together portfolios demonstrating our benchmarks (though most of us still save student work in the department office). But nothing took the place of the old benchmarks the department had worked so hard on. Instead, as teachers began to realize the STAR test was here to stay, many struggled against it, rejecting it in principle, but failing to hold fast to any alternative.
The result has been a breakdown in department unity. In a survey of my department, over and over teachers responded that we no longer have an articulated writing program, that the department is “confused” and that whatever standards we have “aren’t checked for anything.” At the same time, pressure from the administration to perform better on the state tests has increased. Almost every teacher surveyed indicated they had felt personal or departmental pressure to alter curriculum to focus more on the tests. Initially this was difficult as the STAR test was not aligned with the state standards, and so teachers rejected the pressure out of hand. However, the more recent STAR tests do reflect the standards, making the pressure, and the tests themselves, less easy to ignore. And, as our test scores stagnate and we get closer and closer to being labeled a ”failing school,” it is only going to get worse.
Another wrinkle is the state mandated graduation exam, the CAHSEE. Given in the tenth grade and repeated seven times if necessary, this test is intended to guarantee a minimum standard of proficiency for all California graduates, including those with learning disabilities and whose first language is something other than English. The pressure on us to prepare our students for this new test is understandably enormous, as even parents have begun to ask what we are doing to prepare their students to pass the test.
As a result of these increased pressures, even the most reluctant in the department have begun to give in. Though the department is still scrambling and without a cohesive vision, several steps have been taken with regards to testing. The department has purchased and is advocating the use of a comprehensive grammar program at the freshman and sophomore levels. So while we no longer have department benchmarks for writing, we do have them for discrete grammar instruction and much time is now spent teaching parts of speech, phrases, clauses, and punctuation. Most teachers in the department now spend at least a week or two explicitly practicing for the state tests. Most do practice tests for the CAHSEE and some do extensive “test prep” units including general strategies for standardized testing.
In my classroom, the results of these new pressures are significant and similar to what I know has happened in my colleagues’ classes as well. I spend hours and hours teaching grammar to students unmotivated to learn it, but who will quietly do their drills because they know it is “good for them” and because they fear the exit exam. The result has been that while they have consistently improved in spotting errors in sentences on the board and in worksheets, the grammar in their own writing has improved very little. This jibes with the tests though, as the STAR test has no writing but lots of discrete grammar questions, and the CAHSEE, while it has some writing, also focuses primarily on multiple choice, error-recognition questions. I spent two weeks this year doing practice tests and teaching test-focused writing, warning my students about such test pitfalls as straying away from the prompt and messy handwriting. In addition to the time spent on this new curriculum, there is the time taken on the tests themselves. English teachers lose roughly one week of teaching time every year to the STAR tests, which are given in every grade but twelfth, and face the disruption of several more weeks due to testing in other subjects. Sophomores face an additional week of CAHSEE testing.
This new curriculum and the time spent testing is eating into the already limited time teachers have to address the rigorous state standards. Though my students felt prepared for the tests, in fact most found them easy, much of value has been lost from my curriculum and my coverage of the standards is surface at best. I have not taught a proper poetry unit in two years, I have dropped one formal paper in each semester, and there is less time for multiple-draft writing. Though my class size has stayed about the same, the amount of authentic writing my students do has suffered. The focus has shifted from process to product in many ways as well, thanks to an increased emphasis on timed writing. The same is true in my colleagues’ classrooms as well.
Yes, much has changed in the past five years, but of course much is sure to change in the next five years as well. Two current trends are sure to shape the writing classroom in the near future. The first is the economy and the second is a continuing drive for “accountability” that shows no sign of slowing. The plunging stock market, recent energy crisis, and increased homeland security spending have sent the California state budget into a tailspin with deficits predicted in the $38.2 billion range (Lucas). Though the specifics of next year’s budget are still uncertain, everyone knows the cuts in public education spending will be deep; the only question is how deep. As the state’s schools plan for crippling budget cuts, they are slashing staff and “nonessential services” and programs wherever they can. At my high school, these changes will primarily come in the form of fewer teachers and increased class size. Though the political pressure is high to save class size reduction in grades K through 3, less is being said at the state level about funding ninth grade class size reduction (Posnick-Goodwin 9). Though high school class size reduction has never been fully funded, what funds there were seem to have evaporated, leaving schools little incentive to maintain small ninth grade classes. In planning next year’s schedule at my high school, freshman English classes started at twenty to one, quickly moved to twenty-five to one, and seem to have settled at twenty-eight to one for next year though they could still go as high as thirty-three to one.
Remember that these are composition classes. Using the formula established before, this teacher’s reading load has just increased from five hours per paper assigned to a class of twenty to seven hours in a class of twenty-eight. Sadly, there is no reason to assume class size increases will stop at ninth grade. Our twenty-five to one cap on composition classes has always been a “courtesy” cap. As funding pressures increase over the next few years, many in the department predict the administration will soon throw courtesy to the wind in favor of cheaper, more “efficient,” classes of thirty-three to one. In addition, the tight schedules and reduced staffing required by the current budget have nearly eliminated our once thriving integrated programs, denying student and teachers another valuable avenue of writing support.
All this is only exacerbated by the continued pressure to succeed on state tests despite budget woes. Contrary to the hopes of many in the educational system, state tests have not faded away. The federal government recently passed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), requiring annual reading and math testing in grades three through eight and at least once in high school (NEA). The law also sets proficiency targets, declaring that all students will be “proficient” by 2014 (NEA). Further complicating the issue is that, though President Bush promised to fully fund NCLB, federal government funding is $8 billion short of authorized levels this year and Bush’s proposed allocation for 2004 is $11 billion short (NEA). The political opposition to NCLB has been fierce as state budgets languish and it has become obvious that few schools, if any, will meet the proficiency target. In California, state officials are backtracking on implementing the CAHSEE this year because it will tragically affect graduation rates as forty-eight percent of this year’s graduating students still have not passed the test (Exit Exam).
Yet the state assures us the test will survive, and the pressure to test often and test well is still there, so in a time of dire budget crisis, there is money for testing and testing support. As class size goes up in writing classes and support programs are cut across the curriculum, newly created classes focused specifically on remediation for the CAHSEE in math and English are still capped at twenty. As more and more class time is spent on test prep and grammar, less and less time will be spent on reading and writing. In my own classes, I can see a shift from broad, open-ended compositions to sentence level writing and even more timed writing. If school funding, graduation, and the evaluation of my performance as a teacher are to be based primarily on tests with little writing (none of it authentic or meaningful), tests that focus on error recognition, and not revision, how can I do otherwise? Parents and legislators do not want to read portfolios; they want to see test scores.
I admit the pressures imposed by the testing movement are not all negative. Though lofty, the state language arts standards are worthy targets by and large, and I am happy testing pressures seem to be bringing some focus to my department which has been set adrift since the loss of local benchmarks. Next year the department will embark on a project to articulate our curriculum and align all courses clearly and concretely with the state standards. And many teachers point out the tests encourage students and teachers alike to focus on admittedly less interesting but under-addressed “basic” skills often lacked by even our brightest students. Certainly learning to write beautiful, coherent, grammatical sentences is a goal any writing teacher can support. And yes, the CAHSEE can and does act as a carrot for many reluctant students who fear not graduating (though once students pass, or come to believe they will never pass, this incentive evaporates entirely, leading many to say the CAHSEE actually decreases motivation). And clearly testing alone cannot be blamed for all the woes affecting today’s schools. The economic struggles of the schools simply mirror those of the nation.
But the fact remains, in the rush for greater accountability, we are leaving the learner behind. I fear supportive classrooms where students have the time to write and revise are disappearing, replaced by frantic test-focused writing and grammar drills. Class sizes are increasing, and testing and test-prep eat into valuable classroom time, leaving overworked teachers with less time to respond to the writing needs of more students. Invaluable integrated classes and support programs that encourage and nurture student writers are being replaced by test-focused remediation and a high pressure, high stakes environment. Ironically, as the pressure increases to leave no child behind, we risk leaving more behind than ever.
For as long as I have been around schools, people have trumpeted the failures of public education, but honestly this has never really bothered me because the definition of this failure is imposed from the outside, leveled bluntly and often ignorantly at the schools in general. I have always been able to look around my room and my school and see the concrete growth in my students as young writers. I have never needed politicians to tell me my students are learning. It is only now as testing and budgetary pressures encroach upon my ability to foster this learning, that I fear I soon really will teach at a failing school.
Works Cited
The Academic Performance Index (API): Ten Things a Parent Should Know. GreatSchools.net. 4 November 2001 <http://www.greatschools.net/cgi-bin/showarticle/ca/72/improve>;.
Arcata High School. GreatSchools.net. 20 May 2003 <http://www.greatschools.net/cgi-bin/ca/ach_more/1047#cahsee>;.
Eureka High School. GreatSchools.net. 20 May 2003 <http://www.greatschools.net/cgi-bin/ca/ach_more/1007#cahsee>;.
“Is state ready for exit exams?” The San Francisco Chronicle. SFGate.com. 16 March 2003 <http://www.sfgate.com/cgibin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/03/16/ED241423.DTL>;.
Lucas, Greg. “Deficits predicted for state. Davis' budget would balance for a year then dive, says report.” The San Francisco Chronicle. SFGate.com. 20 May 2003 <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/05/20/BA260706.DTL>;.
National Education Association (NEA). "The Law: What It Is, And What It Isn't." NEA Today May 2003: 22-24.
Posnick-Goodwin, Sherry. "Don't Turn Back the Clock, Smaller Class Sizes Work." California Educator May 2003: 6-11.
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