ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 24, 1996 TAG: 9603220101
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROBERT C. SMALL
I REMEMBER an old anecdote about a vegetable gardener who was worried because there hadn't been any rain for a long time and his corn and tomatoes weren't growing.
He decided to measure the height of the corn every day, and the roundness of the tomatoes. He thought if he measured them, they'd grow. He didn't bother to water them. That would have cost too much.
That's what the administration of Virginia Gov. George Allen seems to think will work with the new Standards of Learning. Convince the General Assembly to spend $12 million on measuring (the governor would have liked $20 million), and you'll get growth.
Measuring tells us where we are. It doesn't tell us a thing about where we ought to be or how to get there. Spending any dollars on measuring should come after spending lots more dollars on teaching students what's to be measured. Unfortunately, although the General Assembly restored some important education funding to the 1996-98 budget, there were no extra dollars - not even a few - for teaching students what we want them to learn.
A Feb. 21 Roanoke Times editorial, ``Putting schools to the test,'' seemed to recognize the problem with spending millions to test students' mastery of the new Standards of Learning without spending the millions first to teach the students. I'd like to tell more about where that plan goes far astray.
The new Standards of Learning represent a major departure from what is currently taught in Virginia schools - and, indeed, everywhere else in the country. However, Virginia's new budget contains no additional funds for curriculum development by school systems to implement those SOLs. The state Board of Education proposed such funds, but the item was eliminated from the budget before the governor sent it to the legislature.
The staff of the state Department of Education has been reduced during the past two years by more than 50 percent. It no longer can provide curriculum-development and other support to local school systems. Implementation of the SOLs will be almost entirely the responsibility of each school division, using already limited resources.
No money is in the budget to purchase or develop textbooks and other materials. Existing commerical texts and other instructional materials do not reflect the new SOLs, so texts will have to be created specifically for Virginia. No textbook company is likely to develop textbooks and other instructional materials entirely for sale in Virginia unless that development is heavily subsidized. The Virginia market is just not large enough.
Districts vary greatly in the resources available to them. The western part of Virginia has been the scene of several unsuccessful efforts to persuade the state to equalize the funds available per student for all schools. With all schools held accountable for meeting the SOLs through a uniform set of standardized tests - created at a cost of $12 million - many systems doing an excellent job of educating will be penalized because they lack the funds to implement the standards.
An agenda item that the state Board of Education did not get to at a recent meeting would have made teachers, superintendents and school-board members liable in civil court if student scores did not meet a state-mandated level, regardless of differences among systems. Indeed, had the proposal passed, Virginia's Board of Education would have been given the power both to remove superintendents and school-board members and to charge them in court with failure to carry out their duties.
Although the state Department of Education has been reduced by more than 50 percent of its staff, it would be expected to administer an elaborate assessment program and to follow that assessment with punitive actions against systems that, based on test scores alone, would be condemned as having failed in their responsibilities. In that punitive setting, it is clear that standardized, uniform testing of students on the SOLs would take on a special menace.
It seems contradictory that a state administration with negative views about centralized government wants to strip local school systems of control of the school curriculum and means of assessment.
We all agree that children's learning needs to be measured frequently in order to be sure that they are in fact meeting the goals we have set for them. With an assessment that narrowly focuses on the details set out in the SOLs, however, teachers in many schools will be forced to teach to those test items.
In many cases, the SOLs are so far removed from what children can learn at a particular age that drilling them to pass the tests will take all of the time available for instruction. Doing that will leave no time for other important aspects of those children's education. There will be no time to light a spark of excitement in them about reading books, about exploring the world around them, about the language they speak and write.
If $12 million is available for schools, I believe a far better use of it would be to support student learning. To waste it on creating an elaborate testing program merely means that we will be measuring yesterday rather than nourishing the very learning that we hope will take place.
Robert C. Small is dean of Radford University's College of Education and Human Development.
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