Delaware Teachers: Students Are More than Test Scores

[Bob Schaeffer <bobschaeffer@earthlink.net>]

TEACHERS: TESTS DON'T DEFINE OUR STUDENTS

The (Delaware) News Journal -- August 12, 2007
by Alison Kepner

As students return to class this month, Delaware teachers are spending 
big bucks to spread their back-to-school message: "A student is more 
than a test score."

Last week, 44 billboards went up statewide, soon to have their message 
reiterated in a two-week radio spot that will hit the airwaves Aug. 20.

Delaware State Education Association, the state's largest school 
employee union, will spend $49,000 on the campaign.

The message is a shot at the federal No Child Left Behind law, now up 
for re-authorization. DSEA leaders' aim is to let families know that 
teachers know testing is not teaching and that testing is not learning.

"Teachers in public schools are caring people who understand that the 
goal is students who are productive, hard-working, responsible citizens 
who live up to their potential," spokeswoman Pamela Nichols said in an 
e-mail. "Testing is a tool to evaluate teaching and learning -- it's not 
the goal. But that is what it has become under NCLB."

Frederika Jenner, a sixth-grade science teacher at H.B. du Pont Middle 
School in the Red Clay Consolidated School District, said it is an 
important message.

"There has just been such an incredible focus on scores, on individual 
student scores, on class scores, on school scores, on using scores to 
prove or disprove a teacher's effectiveness," she said. "Ever since the 
first day I stepped in the classroom, I understood my accountability. My 
greatest accountability is to those kids sitting in front of me and to 
their families.

"Most of the teaching staff gets that and responds to it."

"This focus on testing as the be-all and end-all, as the No. 1 indicator 
of the success of a student or the success of a teacher or the success 
of a school has distracted us," she said.

Nichols said educators want students to love learning, not love being 
tested: "For many students, an overemphasis on testing will, in fact, 
kill their love of learning."

http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070812/NEWS/708120369/1006/NEWS