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Forget tests, Focus on the love of learning

By Greg Biance
I have always been a follower of (Citrus County Chronicle Publisher) Gerry Mulligan’s writing. I don’t know if it is the common Catholic school influence on our view of life or he just has an interesting perspective on the world. I am sure it is both. It touched me when he wrote about a childhood experience as a young paperboy who took a little time to listen to a Holocaust survivor. Mrs. Larson, Gerry’s customer, was marked by a degrading series of numbers tattooed on her wrist, put there when she entered the Auschwitz camp. No human should ever be a number, and it obviously moved him to this day.

This scarring by numbers still goes on today — not to minimize the horrific event that targeted Jews. I loathe the current business model driving education today. It marks humans without a soul and without depth of other giftedness. It is one-dimensional and tragically linear in thought.

On the same day Gerry’s column was published, Nat Hentoff wrote about a 70-year-old retired educator named Carmen Farina. The mayor asked her to return and help reform New York’s education system. Her vision is about bringing “joy” back into the classroom. It is about inspiring children to learn and grow.

As the politically right have continued to push accountability through excess testing in Florida, the classroom has suffered. Yes, our end-of-course scores can go up, but it is the lifelong learning where my greatest concern has heightened. The trick is not in moving numbers, but moving people to want to learn. I am disillusioned by Florida’s political forces that place monetary value to human value. If that is the case, I have little value as an educator. The rich businessman, ballplayer, actor only have real value. Numbers do not lead to superiority, just more money or a bigger paycheck. A few kids get bragging rights and others walk away marked as not good enough to learn in school. This negative correlation can metastasize into every fiber of a human.

I see zombies walking blindly encouraging this practice. How can one obtain passion, when it appears that the big test becomes the center of this new universe? The misinterpretation of two to three poorly written test questions on our past Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test scores or the evolution of the new end-of-course testing can affect the students’ ranking, stigmatize schools and affect our district’s ranking and funding. The demographics of local regions, a collective effort of the majority of parents’ minimized involvement with teens working towards educational achievement. Local hardships and disconnected parental control have not been factored into education’s business model. It is the area we do not discuss in society because it is culturally biased and makes people nervous. Unfortunately, real estate’s term of “location, location, location” is real.

The number is all that is seen these days. It removes the face of the child, it masks the modern emotional impact that is evident of our confused culture. I feel they compare areas that are not apples with apples. That is what a spreadsheet does in business when the bottom line is a number. The complexity of each human and their unique strengths outside of the test are lost. This should never be a reality, yet it crept in and now is embedded deeply in Florida’s dialogue in teacher training and professional development. The contradiction is when these two somewhat opposing forces push and pull on the educators to chase the data on the sheet. Teachers are expected to juggle both the data and a conflicting demand to engage our youth with interesting ideas and intellectual thought.

More engaging teacher prep is essential as conceptual ideas are noted, but questioning to support concepts is left to others. Now others write these test questions, which are supposed to be from objectives or standards, yet they integrate some confusing reasoning skills that require assemblage. They create a high-stakes test. College-bound students would have seen these questions in entrance exams, but now the total student body is driven by possible vagueness, with less sophisticated reading comprehensions skills and abilities. Yes, there is giftedness in some test takers. Are they really smarter?

I believe I can write a pretty challenging test in biology, but my variety of assessment and teaching style is of much better use of time while developing lessons. The money holders control these enterprises. Something has to give, and many need to start speaking up to counter the biased number. The state is stepping up the testing across the academic arena. Kids will be tested to death, with a number deciding their destiny. How many graduating classes of students will have to succumb to this myopic methodology? This business model has brought us to this unfortunate stage in education. Ask a well-experienced politician to pass the very test they implemented and you will be surprised by the data spreadsheet. Elections and moving ideas to the center might alter the future.

So when I read another human story, it stirred my passion to combat any program that limits individuals to a number. We are more than this. We are better than this. Giftedness comes in so many packages.

Greg Biance is a teacher in Citrus County and is a former Teacher of the Year.

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