Accountability, Yes. Teaching to the Test, No.

In the “inner city” of college town Bloomington, Indiana, sandwiched between a church and street after street of low-income, government-issued housing, sits Fairview Elementary School. 55 staff members and countless volunteers make a whole-hearted attempt to make a difference in their students’ lives every day. Fairview has failed the ISTEP test as a school for more than three years in a row, making it a “choice” school by No Child Left Behind standards. This means that parents may choose to send their children to another school in the district, a “better” public school if you will. Because of this option, the school is left with just the children whose parents either do not know about their option or do not care enough to take advantage of it. The students who are more academically advanced than their peers are quickly sent to the better schools in the district, leaving the students who are struggling to pass the standardized tests. For this reason, I see the viewpoint of Patricia Duebel when she states in her article, “Accountability, Yes. Teaching to the Test, No.” that “there is little doubt in educators’ minds that the current system mandated by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has contributed to problems. Students are caught in the middle.” Because of the strict standards that were created by this program, students are being fed raw facts and expected them to simply reproduce them on a standardized test. Teachers who are just teaching to the test are depriving their students of the well-rounded education that they should be receiving.


I was a volunteer at Fairview Elementary School this past semester, therefore allowing me to experience first-hand the extreme poverty and lack of parent involvement to which the school is subject. Despite the best efforts of the teachers, the students continue to fail the state’s standardized tests. The first difficult question I had to answer was, “Why is this grand failure happening when each and every teacher at this school is so passionate about their students?” I quickly learned that teaching to the test is just not possible in an inner city school. While the teachers would love for their students to be able to perform at the same level as the students who attend private schools, the fact of the matter is that the children attending Fairview need so much more than an education. Their families are essentially non-existent, making their ability to learn plummet. Teachers at Fairview have duel responsibilities; they have to help their students pass ISTEP as well as create a family-like environment to promote a well-rounded, healthy child. This duel responsibility is essentially the reason why Fairview continues to fail ISTEP. My mentor teacher believed that she could speak for the entire faculty and staff when she told me that the No Child Left Behind standards were too strict and should not carry such strong repercussions. Fairview is an excellent nurturing environment, but when it comes to testing standards, the school just cannot perform well.

As I was reading Duebel’s article and making connections between her feelings and what I saw at Fairview, I began to wonder if these frustrations were common among both public and private schools. I grew up in Geist, a suburb of Indianapolis near Fishers, and I had a fairly positive schooling experience. I attended three elementary schools, the last of the three being a magnet school, the public middle school, the public high school for my freshman year, and ended up in a private school for my remaining high school years. In my elementary years, I remember taking ISTEP and other standardized tests, but I do not remember ever feeling like I was not learning a lot or having any difficulty passing the tests with flying colors. The majority of my peers experienced the same success as I did. Four of my five elementary teachers were extraordinary and I learned an immense amount from them. I began to experience teachers who taught to the test during middle school because the district combined students from both the city and from the suburbs. Even with this being the case, I was placed in an honors program, and I feel that I was encouraged to learn more than just what was on the test because of that program. It was not until my freshman year that I began to have problems with the way my teachers taught. I transferred to a private school because they did not have to follow the standards of No Child Left Behind as closely as the public schools did; I felt that because of that I learned above and beyond what was expected of me in high school. Of course, the problem I see here is that private school costs money, and that means that private school is fairly exclusive and for the most part does not share the same frustrations as its public school neighbor.

So, since private schools do not feel much pressure from the government, is there a difference between schools in the suburbs versus being in the inner city? From my experiences I would say yes, there is a difference between the two. For a week during the summer between my junior and senior years in high school I took an education course at Taylor University Fort Wayne. We worked with an inner city elementary school summer program. This was the first time I had ever experienced an inner city setting, and I was astounded by the lack of parental involvement and support. I realized during that week that I was very fortunate to have both of my parents heavily involved and interested in my education. Schools located in the inner city or lower income areas tend to have less parent involvement than those in middle to high class areas. Because students only spend part of their day in school, the quality of their family lives will influence the way in which they perform on tests. The week at Taylor University Fort Wayne showed me a lot about inner city schools, and my work with the students at Fairview only promoted those ideas more.

Another main idea of Duebel’s article discussed the repercussions that followed a school’s failure to produce acceptable results on the standardized tests. These days, teachers are concerned about losing their position if their students do not perform well on the government-issued tests. Schools that fail their standardized tests for a certain number of consecutive years become choice schools, and this basically sets them up for continued failure. Basically, the quality of a school is being based entirely off of the results of its students on the state’s standardized test, and many schools are beginning to base the quality of a teacher off of his or her students test results. Something about this just does not seem fair. Should quality be measured solely on test results, or can multiple aspects of a school be taken into consideration? Just as college admissions representatives look for students who are well-rounded, just as an individual’s health includes both mental and physical aspects, and just as humans do not judge based on exclusively one aspect of another’s personality, a school or a teacher should not be judged solely on test results.

Germaine, better known as G, a boy in the kindergarten class in which I worked, had some of the worst behavioral problems I have ever seen. It was obvious that his family life was broken, but I could see something in him that not many others could see. I took as many opportunities as I could to work one-on-one with G, and after weeks of struggling through assignments that the other students were able to complete with ease, G completed an alphabet worksheet all by himself. The amount of joy and happiness that radiated from him was incredible; no one had ever seen him so energetic. This one success gave me hope that without the pressure of strict standardized tests and the freedom to work with students on what they need rather than on what they will be tested, student success will increase. Unfortunately for G, he will probably struggle to pass ISTEP every year, and after turning eighteen, he will likely drop out of high school and live on minimum wage for the rest of his life. I truly believe that Duebel was right; No Child Left Behind just creates and contributes to problems in the educational system, and the students are trapped. Some serious changes need to be made by the government if we want to see successful students in the future.