Blitzing for scores
What test-prep season reveals about our educational priorities
Originally published in the Moultrie News.
I’ve observed a concept occurring in several public schools called “blitzing.” It starts about a month before standardized testing begins. It seems to be a very chaotic attempt at “cramming” for the test. What are your thoughts?
Such practices do take place in many schools across the country. “Blitzing” (there are several terms for it, but I like yours) can involve any or all of the following:
Schools reorganize the day entirely. Instead of students changing classes, each group stays in the same room except for lunch and related arts. Related arts teachers are pulled away from their own subjects and reassigned to test-prep lessons. Academic teachers rotate from room to room teaching groups of students they may not even know.
It may involve abandoning electives, regrouping students by performance level, concentrated remediation blocks, academic “boot camps” and “power hours,” benchmark-prep weeks, and rotating intervention teachers. Essentially, it’s no-holds-barred, all-hands-on-deck test preparation.
The obvious conclusion is that standardized testing must be really, really important to the blitzers because one of the most valuable strategies used by high-quality schools is routine. Research — including a major Economics of Education Review study — confirms that kids perform better, behave better, and learn at higher levels when schedules, teachers, and norms are predictable, routine, and orderly.
Therefore, schools willing to sacrifice something so valuable must believe the payoff justifies it. But what is the payoff? It’s not big learning jumps. Administrators will tell you themselves: it’s small increases. They don’t hide the fact that a point here or there can make the difference between the top schools, the average ones, and the failures. And who can blame them? Most incentives in education are built around higher test scores.
Hence, if such tactics ever did result in big gains, you can bet that 1) every school in the country would be doing it, and 2) they would do it all year long, because in education if one bottle quiets the baby then administrators reason that a hundred will make him ecstatic.
None of this is to say that higher scores are a bad thing. Scores give us valuable information about what students are and are not learning, and we should treat them seriously. But what we should not do is sacrifice the child’s long-term learning to chase marginal and often temporary score increases. And when we interrupt stable classroom relationships and authentic learning environments to cram for a test, that’s exactly what we’re doing.
Consider the blitzers that make related arts teachers abandon their subjects in favor of test prep activities. Yes, reading and math are critical skills. But so are art, music, PE, health, and other enrichment subjects. When we dump them for test-cramming, we’re not sending the message that reading is more important than art — we’re showing kids that the State Assessment of Basic Reading Skills is more important than art.
That’s not good for anybody, especially a system that should be designed to enlighten all aspects of a student’s academic world, not develop tunnel vision for a few “priority standards.”
Obviously, targeted review before an exam is normal and reasonable, and it’s common within the subject areas being tested. But restructuring an entire school around short-term test cramming raises serious questions about priorities. Is this really why we put our kids on buses and send them off to schools every day?
When our kids accept their diplomas, are we anxiously hoping they remember how to determine the surface area of a rectangular prism and distinguish between the 3rd person limited and omniscient point of view? If we want something broader and stronger for them, then it’s difficult to see how “blitzing” helps.
But simply ending the method won’t fix the problem. In education, our methods start much farther upstream, with our values — like regarding authentic learning above metric performance. Our values determine our goals and our goals determine our methods.
To strengthen the methods, we must repair the values.
Jody Stallings has been an award-winning teacher in Charleston since 1992 and is director of the Charleston Teacher Alliance. To submit a question, order his books, or follow him on social media, please visit JodyStallings.com.