Experiences with Student-Centered Teaching and Learning in High-Stakes Assessment Environments

Abstract

Introduction This is a story of how high-stakes assessment policies in one large urban district impacted on the implementation of student-centered teaching and learning in one fifth-grade classroom. It is a re-telling of my lived experience as I spent time in Esther's fifth-grade room over the period of one academic year. I am telling a story among stories, the tale as I have come to understand it, extracted from a much more complex narrative about teaching in urban schools. In this paper I am arguing that the impact of high-stakes assessment programs, those agendas that arbitrarily set performance cut-points, meting out consequences to students, schools, and teachers who fail to meet these artificially prescribed standards, have a chilling effect on the implementation of student-centered, constructivist practices in the classroom. I am arguing that high-stakes assessment conflicts with the goal of truly educating students. The question is not, it seems to me, one of whether or not we ought to have a form of high stakes assessment, or even what kind of high stakes assessment we ought to consider. The question rather, is one that Paulo Freire (1970) would have us ask, who is benefiting from the explosion of high stakes assessment in the United States? This study took place in a large midwestern urban district. In 1985, a wave of statewide school reform driven, in part, by notions of social construction and student-centered approaches established more local control for schools. This reform granted the selection of principals and the spending of school discretionary funds to local school councils made up of parents, community members, teachers, and the principal of the school. Curriculum decisions were also within the general control of the local school council as well. There are some indications that local control may have a significant impact on student achievement. In a study conducted by the Consortium on Chicago School Research standardized test scores were examined over an eight-year time period. The consortium looked at scores, which represent the difference between entering and exiting scores on achievement tests. From 1988 to 1996, gain scores in reading across grades showed indications of rising trends (Bryk, Thum, Easton, & Luppescu, 1998). The 1985 school reform recognized that time was one of the most precious commodities available to the system. Implementation of reform would take time if real solutions to issues like institutionalized poverty and multiple cultural norms were to be understood and mitigated in the best interest of students. A short six years later, swept up in the rhetoric of the failure of educational systems (Berliner & Biddle, 1995), a strong political movement toward recentralizing the district to place control of local schools once again in the hands of the central school board was endorsed. This new reform abandoned the gains of the earlier wave of reform. The political effort of the city government was successful, convincing the state assembly to turn control of the schools back to the city and the mayor. A new school board began to attack reforms demanding an immediate fix to what the reform board termed an otherwise intolerable condition. Low test scores were the culprit, in spite of that indicated otherwise. The mission of the new board was to see that every student read at grade level. I had the sense we suddenly were transported to Lake Woebegone where all the children are above average. The cry of the new board has been bewildering. On the one hand they claim research shows that our vision of the future is the correct approach to fix our schools. On the other, when faced with critical the claim is made that we are successful in spite of our critics. A return to basics, to explicit direct phonics instruction, to structured lessons scripted by others for teachers to parrot, became the party line, though it was never explicitly required to teach from the back-to-basics approach. …

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