NCLB Watch: LIVING WITH TESTING

Testing and the Limits of Compromise

By John R. Snyder

I don't wish to speak for anyone else, but I believe the issue is this: in an authentic Montessori Children's House (and to a great extent in the Elementary), the children work from joy, from innate wonder, and from the internal urgings of their sensitive periods. They develop according to their own timetables, not according to adults' timetables. They do not work from "challenges," or from comparing themselves to other children, or from comparing themselves to an external standard set by anonymous adults, or from competition, or from extrinsic rewards, or from coercion. These things are foreign to the young child's spirit and natural way of developing through work. To allow such foreign notions to intrude into an environment otherwise prepared for the child's authentic development is to distort that environment and thereby to distort the child's development. Children this young have no business worrying about how they stand in relation to what adults think of as "basic skills."

Moreover, reliance on standardized test scores distorts the teacher's relationship with the child and with his/her own practice of deep observation of the child's true needs. This is especially true of the Montessori teacher who has the luxury of working so closely with every child. No standardized test of academic knowledge or skills can tell a good Montessori teacher anything that he or she doesn't already know about the child or could not, at least, easily discover for themselves without the intrusive mechanics of testing. On the other hand, such tests often obscure what is really going on with the child and play into our laziness and "group think" regarding what next intrusion to make into the child's development. I have never been helped by knowing a child's standardized test scores (including my own as a child), although I have sometimes been misled or put in the double bind of having to choose between what is best for the child and what is best for my own comfort or reputation. Teachers who work in the public sector tell me they must often choose between what they know is best for the child and what will allow them to keep their jobs. The current standardized testing craze is tragic in another sense: it takes our attention away from exactly those things that are the most critical aspects of successful learning and fixes it on a phantasm built of numbers. It chews up enormous amounts of our limited resources of money, time, talent, attention, and energy-to no good purpose.

I have never yet seen an accommodation to standardized testing (at any age) that did not distort the learning experience and the development of healthy attitudes toward life and lifelong learning. If anyone thinks they have one, I'd love to see it.

Standardized testing is not value-neutral-not something that can just be added onto the Montessori way with no consequences for the children, parents, teachers and administrators. It comes along with a large complex of assumptions, attitudes, beliefs, and practices that are contrary to what we as Montessorians think we know about the nature of the child. It is a technique that exists only because of the serious philosophical and factual errors and misunderstandings of the educational bureaucracy and its allies in the academic bureaucracy and the educational testing industry. It is a "fix" for a set of problems that would not exist if schools were structured around the needs of children instead of the discredited theories and the economic expedience of adults who are manifestly more interested in their own agendas than they are in the needs of children.

(Even so, there are many in the traditional educational establishment who argue convincingly that this "fix" does not even work as planned. My personal favorites from outside the Montessori world are Susan Ohanian's One Size Fits Few: The Folly of Educational Standards and Frank Smith's The Book of Learning and Forgetting . )

So, the agony many of us feel over mandatory standardized testing is real, not an artifact of politics. It is the pain of having to reconcile things that are irreconcilable. Often, the best we can do is damage control. Often, the choice allowed us is not whether or not to amputate but how much of the leg to take off.

John Snyder guides an Upper Elementary class at Austin Montessori School in Austin, TX. jsny...@pobox.com