Proxy Love

Bailey Reimer, a teacher in Chicago, has been teaching her kindergartners to love testing.  She considers their well trained, enthusiastic love of it to be the key to her students’ futures.  Her theory is that the more they welcome being evaluated, the better they will do throughout their years in school.  Her views highlight the ongoing divide over the purposes of and best practices for teaching a nation’s children.

Obviously, there is nothing wrong with helping children to feel secure about being assessed; it’s necessary for getting good diagnostic information.  In that sense, building confidence around testing is not a bad goal, but as a large and lauded part of instruction, it is definitely not a great one.  Education is intended to provide every child with the tools and opportunity for full expression of themselves in their work and personal lives.  Love for testing is a low bar in that attainment.  A test has its use.  But, it is meant to be a tool for educators, not a destination for learners.

High quality classrooms do not build their cultures around test taking. They have a high standards for learning and skill acquisition, but they are built around other values such as inquiry, independence, risk taking, self regulation, curiosity, confidence,  collaboration, empathy. They seek to nurture full development through multiple experiences and pay attention to all the hard and soft skills of intellectual, physical, and social/emotional growth. A well informed parent or thoughtful administrator would be far more interested in what else Reimer cares about and what students experience under her care when they are not being tested.

If I were her administrator, I’d have some hard questions about Reimer’s reward system in the back of the room.  It’s true that kids like to see their growth, but explicit publishing of private performance, even under the cover of daisies, is more questionable.  It shifts the emphasis from individual growth to that of comparison and competition.  Not that comparison or competition are bad things; they can be very motivating in a debate or on the field, and both are part of life.  But, it is not a good practice in the intimate area of skill acquisition.  At the very least, it sends an inaccurate message to very young children.

It bears repeating that, even under the best circumstances, children do not learn at the same pace or with equal ease. They do not come into school with the same foundation. This simple reality is indisputable. Whether the difference stems from the impact of genetic anomaly, prenatal care or environment upon brain development or if it’s in the way that different access to resources and enrichment improves or impedes a child’s preparation upon entry into school, how these differences are addressed in the classroom is important, especially for children experiencing school for the first time in their lives.  Is there some reason to reward the child who learned to read at home and who, through no special skill of their own, achieves at a higher and faster pace than her peers? What about the kid who is dyslexic or developmentally delayed or younger or who has less support at home or isn’t a native speaker? Is there a good reason for a child who is chronically behind others to get a daily dose of shaming through visual comparison with the home grown skill star? Implicit shaming is not an appropriate tool for improving the performance of children or adults for that matter.  There are better ways to inspire effort and celebrate attainment.

Even if all her students’ stars and daisies align, there’s also the problem of promoting a culture of extrinsic reward. It is not the best way to develop the best in people. It does not build agency; it turns learning and doing into merely the means to an unrelated end.   It’s a seemingly small error in kindergarten.  How much agency does a 5 year old need? And 5 year olds are brimming with intrinsic desire to learn. But follow that track as it diverges down the road, and it will matter.  By the time children educated on a steady diet of extrinsic reward get to middle school, many of them will be entirely disinterested in learning, doing and creating for its own sake.   Learning is something that is done to them for purposes other than learning. They’ll be fully ready to trade in their opportunity to invest in themselves for the lesser daisy of being weighed, measured and rewarded (or at least not found wanting).   They will divide themselves into winners and losers in the school game. Those who have had real and lamentable delays already will have had years of being demoralized by comparison, and many of those who experienced success will be reduced to grade grubbing as they root after more reward.  There will a wonderful few who have thriving, curious minds, but for many, their natural curiosity will have been tested and rewarded or punished right out of them.

I do not fault Ms. Reimer for this error.  It’s common to confuse test scores with what they represent.  Certainly, she wouldn’t be the first to believe that banging out scores is proof positive that she’s a good (maybe even great) teacher.  And in the current Race To The Top accountability culture, what teacher wouldn’t love a clean and quantified data stream that seems to say, “Good job! Your daisy, too, is moving up the wall.”  At any rate, she’ll have done one good thing; by the time her students leave her, they will have checked off a whole list of small competencies.  They will be aimed at and ready to chase after next year’s daisies.  What more could there possibly be to teaching?

After all, what difference does it make that the kindergartner who came to school full of desire to learn and discover has ended up a happy little test taker who values nothing so much as the moving daisy.  There are rewards for daisies and data points.  As a teacher, I think these are the accomplishments of average teaching…  she has done the job of preparing her students for the next phase… every flower has moved.  And, when they get to me in middle school, I will be grateful for their skill base.  Nonetheless, I will spend the better part of each year trying to get them to unlearn her best lesson.

 

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2 Responses to Proxy Love

  1. CrunchyMama says:

    So very true! The points about extrinsic motivation resonated with me especially.

    One of my last long-term substitute teaching jobs (before I gave it all up and left public schools) was a 6-week assignment in a 3YO Head Start class in our fairly high-poverty elementary school (about a 50% FARMS rate, even with a magnet program bringing more wealthy kids to the school). The teacher was going on maternity leave and was VERY proud that even though she was *only* expected to have the kids learning about half the alphabet and the associated sounds by the end of their yea with her, she was already up to 20 letters and it was my job to finish the alphabet before Summer.

    After my first week with the kids – and I’d already gotten to know them as their music teacher when that teacher had knee surgery and was out for 9 weeks – it became apparent that there were some HUGE gaps in their “education:” I finally spent most of one morning’s circle time using the “alphabet toy” passing time as a lesson in how to ask politely to have something rather than just TAKE it forcefully without warning or notice from another child. The extra ten minutes spent on practicing “May I have that when you are finished?” “Here.” Thank you!” You’re welcome!” was an investment that paid dividends for the rest of that school year and into the next (I got to sub in the 4YO class once or twice the next Fall). Yay alphabet but WOW, were the priorities skewed, especially for the age group.

    No matter how well-meaning Reimer is, those kids will bear the fruits of her labors for the rest of their lives. The road to Hell is famously paved with such good – albeit uninformed – intentions.

  2. admin says:

    Thanks for the feedback! Someone told me to remove the part about extrinsic motivation… I’m glad I didn’t.

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