TEACHERS - GREAT letter in today's letters/NYT - October 9

October 8, 2013

Invitation to a Dialogue: Don’t Teach to the Test

To the Editor:

In more than four decades of teaching, including 23 years as a secondary-school principal, I have become increasingly dismayed at the growing influence of standardized tests and the test preparation industry for students as young as those entering preschool to those who are preparing to enter graduate-level programs. So I was heartened by the news last month that most New York City private schools are likely to drop the E.R.B. entrance exam for kindergarten and first grade.

Yet this is but one small step in dismantling a financial behemoth that not only produces unrelieved anxiety for students and their parents, but also interferes with students’ independent thinking, deep engagement with ideas in the classroom, and, ultimately, intellectual and moral development. I offer three practical suggestions to restore power to classroom teachers and school leaders rather than the testing industry.

First, I call on colleges and universities to drop the requirement of SAT scores. At a time when economically advantaged students are taking prep courses for the SAT, while students who lack the economic means are without these benefits, our colleges are further promoting the inequities of our society.

Second, our secondary schools must curb their appetite for Advanced Placement courses, which too often fail to prepare students adequately for college-level course work. They also put pressure on students to perform well on the A.P. exams in the spring, leaving them exhausted and lacking a spirit of intellectual curiosity.

Finally, now is the time for all of our schools, from preschool through graduate education, to embrace once again the belief that imagination and creativity are the cornerstones of genuine learning. As E. M. Forster wrote more than a century ago in “Howards End,” in addressing the shortcomings of British universities: “Oh yes, you have learned men who collect ... facts, and facts, and empires of facts. But which of them will rekindle the light within?”

PETER SCHMIDT
Phillipsburg, N.J., Oct. 7, 2013

The writer is the director of studies at Gill St. Bernard’s School.