On Regents Exams
A missive from back in 2011.
This is the unedited post that I wrote to students in 2011, which was a more innocent time — full of vim and vigor and the occasional belief that Sisyphus might be enjoying himself. I present it to you now because of its subject (the delusional/manipulative nature of high-stakes testing, which connects to our unit on lying and logic) and to mark the beginning of our slow descent into testing season. In the next six months, you’ll take the SAT, the ACT, midterm exams, AP exams, and final exams.
At certain points, you’ll remember what it’s like to laugh.
Note: This is the byproduct of that last winding post; you’ll see some of the same language, links, and conclusions in here. There is no assignment attached. I want you to see the shape of the argument that emerged from that other entry, which was itself the argumentative outgrowth of a simple(ish) collaborative assignment. Sometimes, this is the point of writing: to give shape to a thought or to explore an idea until we are free of it. It’s a kind of catharsis. You may understand that; you have all taken the Regents exam in question. If you wish to respond, use the comments section.
From NY State Commissioner of Education John King, writing in 2011:
There’s been a lot of discussion about education in New York recently, but one thing that’s not open for debate is the need to get better. We have many excellent schools and school districts around the state delivering outstanding results for students. Our high school graduation rates have increased consistently and we are a leading state in terms of students taking and passing Advanced Placement exams. However, too many of our students are not graduating from high school, and too many students who do graduate aren’t ready for college or careers. We’re seeing increasing numbers of students who graduate and matriculate at our colleges, only to find they need extensive remediation. They’re being taught things in college they should have learned in high school.
The result? A high school diploma isn’t worth as much as it should be, and college students are wracking up ever increasing debt to pay for courses they should have received in high school. College freshmen are paying college prices for high school courses.
This is not good for students and parents, and, if we want New York to be competitive in the global marketplace, it’s not good for our state. We have to do better.
The shift in the first paragraph (it turns on “However”) implies that higher graduation rates and AP scores correlate to good teaching. That makes a certain kind of sense, but it isn’t a given; graduation can be the result of social promotionor floating standards, and AP scores are only as valid as the tests themselves. Some of those tests — like the one for AP Biology — have been radically rebuilt in the last two years to address a lack of efficacy; courses taught to the old exams were driven by factual recall, by rote memorization and regurgitation, not by critical thinking.
The problem may be the noun King uses to frame the debate: results. He writes that “excellent schools” deliver “outstanding results,” but results are the end of a process. They do not mystically appear out of thin air. Unfortunately, it is difficult to systematize, measure, or remark upon a process. Pundits and politicians need a hard demarcation between failure and success, not the shifting soritical paradox of actual learning, and scores and graduation rates can be tied into neat ribbons of statistics. High-stakes tests feed policy sound bites.
Here in New York, we have the oldest state exams in the country. These Regents exams measure a student’s preparedness for college and the work force, at least in theory. Yet more and more voices agree that our students emerge unprepared from New York State public education, unable to thrive in the 21st-century world. We are in crisis. They lack basic skills, we are told, but in trying to solve that crisis, we may have lost track of the skills that truly matter.
From John Holt, writing in 1967:
[Education] now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and ‘fans,’ driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve ‘education’ but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves.
Perhaps a half-century has ended any “ugly and antihuman business” in public education, and perhaps it hasn’t. Certainly greed and envy and fear continue. But we can focus on that last goal, that we ought “to allow and help people to shape themselves.” That goal rests on the processing and creation of information — what we might more accurately call reading, thinking, and communicating. Or, to add an adverb and make a list:
- Reading closely
- Thinking critically
- Communicating effectively
Close reading encompasses more than textual analysis; it means being observant and curious, which leads to the kind of critical thought that breeds creativity and innovation. From a place of insight and introspection, it takes effective writing or speaking to make sense of the world and to get things done. These three skills are the substructure onto which we build more specific skills, too, from how not to be influenced by advertisements to how to communicate in a relationship. As even recent glances at American education suggest, critical thinking is one of the skills other countries use to outpace us in the global marketplace. And that article identifies more roots of our failure: a lack of “world-class academic standards for [our] students, a curriculum to match the standards, and high-quality exams and instructional materials based on that curriculum.”
The Regents exams of the past might have been called high-quality exams, and they might have been built on world-class standards. It is arguable that they assessed the skills of reading, writing, and thinking, at least in part. Consider this exam from 1977:
It includes informational writing, argumentative writing, narrative writing, questions on grammar and style, and literary analysis. Now consider an exam from 2007:
- Comprehensive Examination in English, 2007: Session One
- Comprehensive Examination in English, 2007: Session Two
The multiple-choice questions have been scaled back and now correspond only to passages on the exam — no more grammar or analogies here. Fortunately, the writing remains somewhat comprehensive: an informational essay first, followed by a persuasive essay, and then an entire day of literary analysis. For all the soul-stripping approaches we employed back in 2007 (the regurgitation of a test-driven formula, the drill-and-repeat grind, the bastardization of good writing), there was still a little merit to the exam itself. We could argue that it tested multiple skills through varied prompts.
Four years later, this test slouched into view:
Writing has all but disappeared. We are left with two paragraphs and a comparative essay, and the three prompts test only the skill of literary analysis. And the more we consider this, the more troubling things ought to look.
This exam — remember that it is ostensibly comprehensive — lasts three hours, whereas Brewster students spend more than 460 hours in an English classroom before they graduate. When these students take the exam, they’ve studied English for half that time, and if they are in a pre-AP English course, they sit for the it six months earlier. This is unique to English, this arbitrary shuffling of the exam date. If a student takes the Biology Regents, it follows a one-year course in Biology. The US History Regents follows a one-year course in US History. Only English skips around, tied to no grade and no curriculum.
The obvious questions: How comprehensive an exam can be written after studying 50% of the content? And if this isn’t a cumulative test of knowledge and skills, if it is not a test of what students learn in four years of English classes, what does it test?
The 2011 exam consists primarily of multiple-choice questions. Students will not see this style of questioning outside of a classroom. It has no real-world analogue; it is entirely a creation of our educational system, so ubiquitous that it assesses elementary students and prospective doctors alike. And while it can be argued that multiple-choice questions test critical thinking (effective ones do, at least), they are only one of many methods for testing that skill. As for the passages on the English Regents, the passages on which these multiple-choice questions are based: They are decontextualized, juxtaposed awkwardly, and serve only to generate the questions.
The writing skills required are similarly decontextualized or defunct. The prompts on the exam call for two paragraphs and an essay of literary analysis; we’ve lost informational, narrative, and argumentative writing. Yet most writing done in the real world is informational or argumentative. There is no real-world utility in literary analysis, because, outside of (some) English teachers and academics, formal literary analysis is rare. And if literary analysis allows for effective writing, emphasizing it exclusively is odd; there are many prompts that allow us to practice that skill while promoting more original and organic thought than another five-paragraph exploration of the themes in Romeo & Juliet.
[Am I my own editor? If so, Ed. note: Paul Graham has the very best explanation for why literary analysis is an ugly historical accident that corrupts good writing. I hadn’t stumbled across him back in 2011, which was, as I said, a more innocent time, when a fool might believe along with Carol Jago that students are “always hungry” to “partake of the richest fare literature has to offer.”]
In the end, the English Regents has the same problems as all standardized tests. What makes it far more dangerous to effective instruction, however, is that it attaches to no clear curriculum and assesses few writing or reading skills necessary for success beyond high school. Regents-styled prompts can easily turn critical thought and expression into the rote regurgitation of decontextualized analysis, most of it available through (or cribbed from) Google and SparkNotes. Analyzing symbolism or theme can easily become a passive, mindnumbing act, one that ignores the way information is shifting in an Internet age.
Of course, it’s not that easy to disobey the state, and far easier to hide behind this aegis: The Comprehensive Examination in English is required for graduation and cannot be circumvented for philosophical reasons. In Brewster, however, that is all it does: It allows students to graduate. The scores no longer affect a student’s GPA. Scoring above an 85 grants “distinction,” but a state-specific “distinction” earned halfway through high school does not factor greatly into college admissions. AP exams, cumulative GPA, and recommendations weigh far more heavily. And compared to the SAT, the ACT, and AP exams, the English Regents weighs almost nothing; it has been stripped down and rebuilt so much in the last few years that no long- or short-term correlation exists.
There is a corollary to that last point: Those other high-stakes tests require argumentative or informational writing, not literary analysis. The only high-stakes test that features literary analysis exclusively is the AP exam for English Literature & Composition — a course specifically designed as a college-level study of literature. If our students aren’t prepared for the world beyond the classroom, perhaps it is because we have limited them to this narrow kind of writing and reading.
So we return to Commissioner King’s admonition to do better in preparing our kids for the global workplace. Teachers create the human capital for that world by inculcating the skills of critical thinking, close reading, and effective communication. Some of us tautologically argue that the state test matters because it is a state test; we serve the students, though, not Albany, and it has become harder and harder to argue that this exam serves the needs of those students. It does not assess valuable skills or knowledge in an effective way. Literature matters; the Humanities matter; but literary analysis is poor practice for good writing, and answering multiple-choice questions in a timed setting is poor practice for critical thinking. An exam requiring only those skills has little academic worth.
Still, some of us will teach to this test. In a world of mounting professional pressure, some of us will always teach to the test, even if the test is pedagogically bankrupt. To those teachers and the Commissioner who employs them: Please read this. It’s an article from Scientific American written by a mother, scientist, and wife of a NYS teacher; she speaks for the world beyond our classroom walls when she says that
[b]y putting a greater emphasis on standardized tests, we are completely snuffing out creative thinking and the ability to problem solve. And that is not a good thing.
The ultimate goal of putting a child through school is to prepare him or her for entering the “real world.” Yes, knowing basic concepts in math, science, history, and English is important when laying an educational foundation (as is foreign language, art, and music, but there are no Regents exams for those subjects). But let’s be honest with ourselves — being able to recite passages from the Federalist Papers is probably not the most useful piece of knowledge; however, being able to interpret these documents — or any other body of intelligent text for that matter — in a way that is both meaningful and relevant is an absolute requirement to be successful.
By emphasizing Regents exams and standardized tests in general, we will be creating a workforce of robots.
Recognize that we can teach our kids to question, to think, to read, and to write in a demanding and precise way, and we can do it regardless of our test scores. If the test does not accurately or effectively assess our teaching, the fault lies with the test. And if the test is faulty, the test should change. Good writing is good writing; clear thinking is clear thinking; insight is insight. Those tautologies work.
2015 Postscript
Back in 2013, the state responded to the cries for higher standards with its usual precision and grace: They got right to work and cheated students and parents to make the test look harder. That didn’t go over very well, so they scrapped everything and rebuilt the test according to the Common Core.
