Teaching toward the Test

From NYTimes, by Michael Winerip:

And I’d also lump teaching toward the evaluations in this educrat nonsense at work in what used to be called education. Ulteriority in teaching, like knowing what students need to know to pass a test (ulteriority) and teaching in a way that leads students to score the teacher higher on an evaluation (ulteriority), deconstructs education. The sooner educrats realize that student evaluations do not measure what the educrats think they measure, the better.

When Mr. Doyle began his career 25 years ago, schools taught current events. But standardized testing and canned curriculums have squeezed most of that out of public education. The A.P. history course is a yearlong race to master several centuries’ worth of facts that may or may not turn up on the exam in May.

“A lot of A.P. is memorizing timelines,” explained Anna Hagadorn, who memorized enough last year to earn a top score of 5.

Even the College Board, which makes so much money selling SAT and A.P. tests that it can pay its president, Gaston Caperton, $872,061 a year, has acknowledged that its A.P. American history exam needs to be revamped. Mr. Caperton has promised by 2013 to deliver a new test that will do a better job of fostering analytic skills.

Mr. Doyle is way ahead of him. For the past several years, after his students have completed their A.P. exams in early May, he has taught a five-week course on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. “Public education must engage the most pressing and troubling issues of our time,” he once wrote in an essay for an education journal.