Sheila balanced an unwieldy box of papers as she walked through the district office. "Cognitive ability testing results," she explained. "Have to hurry back to school to begin state achievement testing, then the next round of MAP testing."
Sheila is a committed educator who taught in the school I headed during her first year of teaching. She now serves as an elementary principal. Her frustration with current education policies runs high. "My work for the last six weeks has been test, sort, stack, pack, send, test again. How much is enough?" she complained.
- Have testing and its accompanying preparation, administration, and reporting functions hijacked our schools' agendas?
- If "what you test is what you teach," has the accountability agenda also imprisoned curriculum and instruction?
- And, most important, What is our work—and our responsibility to the broader society—as school leaders? How do we pursue that work in light of current realities?
- The "render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's" approach applies. Standardized measurement of learning through psychometric data is currently required by law, policy, and practice; and it is here to stay. Educators need to pay this measurement system its due.
- Assessing students' learning is essential. No Child Left Behind obliges us, appropriately, to pay additional attention to the achievement of specific subgroups of students. We are also obliged to adapt testing to better serve students, which means being careful to foster and assess learning not covered on the test.
- To manage this paradox, principals need to plan time for personal and professional reflection as well as for ongoing conversations among fellow educators about the essence of their work as leaders.
We also addressed a larger issue. Principals talked about children in their schools, noting that their essence cannot be condensed into efficiently scored, disaggregated data. Data tools are useful. But even a dramatic increase in test scores headlined in the newspaper must not become the end product of our educational endeavors. What's going on in the hearts and minds of our students must always make the headlines of teachers' attention.
A Counter Narrative: The Whole Child
These principals knew their students. They could name those who spend too much time in their offices or whose names fill the lists of those needing social services. Some live in families facing foreclosure or unemployment. All of their students, like children everywhere, will inherit a seriously challenged environment, an international community in economic turmoil, and global struggles with war. Achievement data with which we grapple have a vital place in our work and decisions. However, the students we serve call us to a nobler agenda.
The narrative prevalent in today's schools focuses on data that show which students are ahead or behind according to narrowly defined criteria. Yet no principal speculates on which students we are to leave behind! Thus, we need to create and articulate a counter narrative to the one that is always tracking who is ahead—and, therefore, who is behind. We need a narrative about the whole child, a belief that maintains that the physical, creative, and emotional dimensions of learning are essential.
- Reflect personally on the questions, What is my work? Why did I enter this profession? This self-questioning must be genuine. All that we think and do emanates from our answers.
- Examine how everyday decisions fit into the context of our beliefs. Acting in accord with our beliefs might, at times, mean negotiating with the central office or with teacher and parent groups when we feel called to oppose practices that those groups endorse or promote.
- Make our convictions about education the consistent headline of our school's story; articulate it in myriad situations: at faculty meetings, in conversations with parents and teachers, and on official bulletins.
- Consistently assert and act on the maxim "This school is about kids."
- Fight to include artistic and creative goals in the curriculum. When money is short, call on the talents of resourceful faculty members to create artistic, stimulating experiences beyond the core disciplines within existing instruction and extracurricular opportunities.
School leaders must articulate the conviction that, above all, the work we do is always about children, not data. This is our social responsibility.
