Don't teach that, "It is not on the test"

I have heard the following statements from different educators:

Why are you teaching that…it isn’t on the test!

Why do you need to know this?  Because it is on the exam!

If I don’t test, then I won’t know what a student knows!

These statements disgust me! 

If you believe tests hold teachers accountable, here is my comment on that.

If you believe that tests cause students to learn material, here is my comment on that.

If you believe tests inform us what students know, here is my comment on that.

I have heard educators, who are required to test their students a month before the end of the course, say the following

“Now that the exam is over, I am going to let you explore!”

It saddens my heart to know that we are required to teach the “boring” stuff to get through all the material for the exam, and after the exam we can then do the “fun” stuff.  Tests are robbing students from open-ended, deep meaning, and creative tasks.  The statement above is not an indictment to the teacher saying it, but actually the test that forces the teacher to teach as such. 

Too many times teachers must tell their students that they are not able to discuss certain passions, due to the timeline of the course.  If these teachers don’t follow the timeline as such, there won’t be enough time to prepare them for the useless bubble sheet they will be provided with at the end of the course.

If you are still not convinced, in our province Gr. 3 teachers are required to teach 1352 outcomes, as all these outcomes will be tested on the provincial achievement exam.  Is this reasonable?

Don't think about thinking....its not on the test.

Does testing hold teachers accountable?

If you think testing is about holding teachers accountable, here is a take on that idea:

An excerpt from the daily papert:

It is this freedom of the teacher to decide and, indeed, the freedom of the children to decide, that is most horrifying to the bureaucrats who stand at the head of current education systems. They are worried about how to verify that the teachers are really doing their job properly, how to enforce accountability and maintain quality control.

They prefer the kind of curriculum that will lay down, from day to day, from hour to hour, what the teacher should be doing, so that they can keep tabs on it. Of course, every teacher knows this is an illusion. It’s not an effective method of insuring quality. It is only a way to cover ass.

Everybody can say, “I did my bit, I did my lesson plan today, I wrote it down in the book.” Nobody can be accused of not doing the job.

But this really doesn’t work.

What the bureaucrat can verify and measure for quality has nothing to do with getting educational results–those teachers who do good work, who get good results, do it by exercising judgment and doing things in a personal way, often undercover, sometimes even without acknowledging to themselves that they are violating the rules of the system.

Of course one must grant that some people employed as teachers do not do a good job. But forcing everyone to teach by the rules does not improve the “bad teachers”– it only hobbles the good ones.