Bad Teacher With Dangerous Philosophy

'Teach to the Test'? What Test?

By Colman McCarthy
Saturday, March 18, 2006; Page A21

From the academic sidelines, where calls to Leave No Child Untested are routinely sounded by quick-fix school reformers, Jay Mathews joins in with his Feb. 20 op-ed column, "Let's Teach to the Test." In well-crafted prose, he reports that "in 23 years of visiting classrooms I have yet to see any teacher preparing kids for exams in ways that were not careful, sensible and likely to produce more learning."

On Mathews's visit to my classroom four years ago -- at School Without Walls, where I have been volunteering since 1982 -- he must not have noticed that not only was I not preparing my 28 students for tests but that I regard tests as educational insults. At School Without Walls and two other high schools where I am a guest teacher -- Wilson High School in the District and Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in lower Montgomery County -- I have never given a test. I respect my students too much to demean them with exercises in fake knowledge.

Tests represent fear-based learning, the opposite of learning based on desire. Frightened and fretting with pre-test jitters, students stuff their minds with information they disgorge on exam sheets and sweat out the results. I know of no meaningful evidence that acing tests has anything to do with students' character development or whether their natural instincts for idealism or altruism are nurtured.

I have large amounts of evidence that tests promote the opposite: character defects. After having two of my high school classes read Mathews's column, I asked the students: If during a test the opportunity came to cheat, with no fear of being caught, would you? A majority of hands went up. A few students dismissed the question as naive. Not cheat if you could get away with it? Get real. When speaking at high school assemblies, I ask students how many can raise their hands and say with total honesty that they never cheated in school. Few hands go up. If some brave souls do confess to honesty, they are greeted with jeers or calls of "yeah, right."

Standardized tests measure braininess and memory skills. American society has plenty of people who were academic whizzes in high school but were so driven by the lure of a high grade-point average that their spiritual lives remained stunted. I worry about students who make too many A's. What parts of their inner lives are they sacrificing to conform to someone else's notion that doing well in tests means doing well in life? Is any time left over from mastering theoretical knowledge for gaining the kind of experiential knowledge found in community service or volunteering in programs such as Special Olympics or DC Reads?

Desire-based learning happens when teachers deal in combustibles, when fires are lit and students burn to explore ideas that have nothing to do with what testocrats require. Quality teachers who are fire-lighters often find themselves trapped in schools that have been seduced by the Advanced Placement fad. Teachers whose students can't hack the AP final are regarded as failures.

School principals get hammerlocked also. They watch teachers' performance the way teachers watch students' performance. A hierarchy results. Most everyone is fearful of someone in power right above. Students worry about teachers, teachers worry about principals, principals worry about school boards, school boards worry about politicians and politicians worry about the voters.

Coleman McCarthy is an idiot. Not just an idiot, but a dangerous idiot. McCarthy is the same type of idiot that has given America outcome based education, the kind of idiot that has given America a sub standard, failed education system.

Students cheat, or feel the need to cheat if they feel unprepared for an exam. They cheat because idiots (I refuse to use the honorific teacher for this fool) like Coleman fail in their job to impart a sense of honor and morality so that their students reject the concept entirely. They are also failing to teach the students that by cheating, they are not beating the system, they are penalizing themselves.

Students need to be taught that just because you can get away with something is not a sufficient reason to do it. For too long now we've listened to idiots just like McCarthy who have apparently imparted to their students the morality of if you get away with it then you haven't done anything wrong.

McCarthy's philosophy is the kind of liberal psycho-babble which creates an unreal expectation of life in his students. Fear is part of life. Learning to deal with various forms of anxiety is part of growning up. McCarthy's technique of not testing protects him from ever having to worry if he is achieving anything at all. Testing is the only means of determing how well and how much students are learning, or if they are learning anything at all.

I suspect the primary thing McCarthy's students are learning is how to avoid responsibility. Having read McCarthy's bio, I realize that to say more would be senseless. Any parent who would send their child to learn non-violence from the director of The Center For Teaching Peace, and any "school" that would offer such drivel in lieu of real subject matter is so far out in Left field that reason and logic serve very little, if any, purpose at all.

Americans complain about the severe decline in our education system since the fifties, I give you Coleman McCarthy, exhibit one.

Full Story: Teacher: Failing Students

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