High stakes testing has real shock value: So when do we stop pressing the button?
Teachers, as a general lot, are rule followers. I realize I risk stereotyping here, and it goes without saying that many educators are not. But…on the whole, as a profession, rule following is a central tenet of this career choice. Think of it. On any day how many times might a teacher utter words like: “Hands by your sides, one two three eyes on me, I’m waiting until you are all are quiet, straight line in the hall…,” not to mention the scores of behavior management systems using stop lights and star charts to encourage rule-following. And I say this with great respect, as a fellow teacher since 1989. I myself have said and done everything that I just outlined above.
In addition, I have heard dozens of teachers laughingly say words to the effects of, “We’re teachers. We follow the rules.” Teaching is a people-pleasing profession. We want parents to like us, students to like and /or respect us; we want positive feedback from our superiors. We don’t like being yelled at, reprimanded, unduly attacked, or to rock the boat. We’re not lawyers after all. We want to be successful. We want to believe that if we only play by the rules, success for the children in our charge will follow. I get it. I do. There’s a reason we don’t want kids to run with scissors or do a flying jump off their desks. Teachers care about the safety and well-being of their students. We want to believe that following the rules will lead to a safe and respectful learning community for all.
But, what happens when conformity and rule following are the greater danger? When is it more dangerous to follow the rules than to break them? When does it become our moral and ethical imperative to break the rules? I would say… right about now.
I have been searching for years for any answer to the question, “If we as teachers know that policy changes to testing and curriculum are detrimental to children, then why do we continue to exercise these changes in our classroom? Why do we ignore our own moral compass, our own judgment, in favor of policy simply because someone else tells us to?” I think I found at least a partial reason:
In the 1960s Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a study called the Milgram Experiment. The goal of the experiment was to examine how everyday average people respond to authority figures when given orders. The broader issue examined was to what extent will people put aside their own judgment and conscience and willingly inflict harm upon another person simply because they’ve been told to do so by a person in a position of authority. Milgram wanted to understand better how average German people could have been so complicit in the horrific acts of the Holocaust in Germany. Were average citizens of this time period actually morally on board with the Third Reich or were they willing to simply cast aside their most deeply held moral beliefs because they were told to follow orders? Milgram’s study went like this: The participants volunteered for the study and were told that they had randomly been selected as the role of “the teacher” while other individuals (who were actually paid actors pretending to be volunteers) we’re selected as the “learners.”
The "learners" were placed on the other side of a wall where they could not be seen by the “teachers.” The teachers were instructed to ask the learners as series of questions. If the learner gave an incorrect answer (which they were instructed to do as part of the study- unbeknownst to the real participants/teachers), the teacher was told by the lab researcher to deliver an electric shock to the learner by pressing a button. While the whole thing was staged, and the learners were never actually shocked (merely making cries of pain that had been audiorecorded), the teachers believed that they were in fact delivering painful shocks to the learners each time they pressed the button. Every time the learner provided an incorrect answer the teacher was told to increase the power in 15 volt increments. As the voltage increased so did the crying, pleading, and banging on the walls by the learners. At some point, most teacher/participants requested to stop the experiment, expressing concern for the learner upon whom they presumed to be inflicting pain. Many began to question the purpose or value of the experiment. However, most of them continued the experiment after being re assured by the lab researchers that they would not be held responsible for their actions, and that the effects of the shock treatment were really not as bad as they sounded.
If participant/teachers continued to question the ethics of the study, they were given a series of verbal prompts by lab researchers that started as a request such as “please continue” and escalated into orders such as “You must continue.” If the participant still wished to stop after the last prompt, the study was discontinued. If not, the study was completed after the learner had received a supposed 450 volts of shock. Experimenters also replied to concerns of the participant teachers with statements such as: "Although the shocks may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on" or "Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly, so please go on."
So what happened? 65% of the study participants selected as teachers completed the experiment to deliver the 450 volts of electric shock to the learners.
In1974 article, Milgram wrote "The Perils of Obedience" in which he summarized his findings in the following way:
The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations … Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.
So, back to the real world of education. I hope the connection here is becoming clear. Teachers are being told that they “must” administer tests which they know to be detrimental to their students as well as to their profession. While the negative effects of high stakes testing (HST) have been illustrated about a billion times (see parent flyer available at www.unitedoptout.com), I will summarize some of them for the cheap seats in the back or for anyone who has been living under a rock for the last decade:
Our system of constant testing is almost designed to produce anxiety and depression in children.
HST actually limits and reduces the amount of QUALITY learning experiences. Rather than focusing on a child’s natural curiosity, HST emphasizes (and drills in) knowledge rather than creating environments that stimulate a child’s imagination.
HST actually reduces a child’s capacity for attaining new knowledge. If they cannot actively make meaning out of what they are doing, they do not learn or remember. But most standardized tests are still based on recall of isolated facts and narrow skills.
Teaching to the test does not produce real and sustained gains on independent learning measures.
High stakes testing leads to under-serving or mis-serving all students, especially the most needy and vulnerable, thereby violating the principle of ‘do no harm.’
From my personal experience, I have witnessed a child running out of a third grade classroom on testing day, to vomit in the trash can due to anxiety. I have heard a child state that “he would rather be homeless than do another worksheet.” We are well on our way to destroying all children’s love of learning, curiosity, and capacity to imagine.
When you ask a teacher why they continue to engage in teaching practices such as skill, drill and kill test prep, or other mind numbing creativity-killing lessons that they know to be the worst way to teach children they will often reply, “Because I’ve been told to.” And for those teachers who have tried to resist, to question the ethics of these new testing policies, the reply from “the powers that be” has been similar to the latter steps of the Milgram experiment: “You must continue.” And to seal the deal we now attach teacher retention and student promotion to the test scores, as a way to eliminate any attempts to resist or refuse. When resistance does rear its head, authority responds with more coercion. We threaten their livelihood to maximize compliance. The grand narrative espoused by high stakes testing reformers includes statements like “We must hold teachers accountable” and “This is for our children’s own good.” Reformers, like the experimenter’s of the Milgram project convince teachers that their continued participation in high stakes testing is both “good” and “necessary.”
What happens? Teachers ignore the cries for equity and justice uttered by millions of public school students. We shut out the sounds of the moans and groans from children aching for a meaningful and exciting learning experience and instead hand out another worksheet that models responses to the test. We deny the voices from within their own conscience that screams “This is wrong.” Why? Because like the Milgram experiment discovered, people will forgo their own moral decision-making in order to comply with orders given from those perceived as authority figures.
Now, while corporate-reformers and proponents of high stakes testing may be self-serving and short-sighted, they are not stupid. They have a firm grasp on marketing techniques and human nature. The character trait of so many teachers-that of being the rule follower, has become something of which they can take advantage. Milgram concluded his summary written in 1974:
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
Teachers are not sheep. But they are as Milgram points out, “ordinary people.” According to Thomas Blass
While we would like to believe that when confronted with a moral dilemma we will act as our conscience dictates, Milgram's obedience experiments teach us that in a concrete situation with powerful social constraints, our moral sense can easily be trampled.
And this is not to single out teachers alone. Nor am I advocating that teachers are merely victims of psychological powers in play. Milgram’s study does not excuse people from doing what is right. But it does perhaps explain why resistance, even in the face of hard facts about what high stakes testing is doing to children, to schools, to public education, is so difficult. The phenomena of complacency and complicity become perhaps more clear.
Parents too often feel the tug of their conscience telling them that something has gone painfully wrong with their child’s education-when weeks upon weeks are devoted sole to test preparation and test taking-tests which do little to advance the quality of creativity or critical thinking of their children, tests which evoke anxiety and stress because more than merely assess what they’ve learned, these tests have high stakes in the balance. Stakes which will not benefit the children themselves in any way. And yet as parents, we hang back and we watch. We too defer to “authority”-few parents could actually even tell you who it was who wrote the latest curriculum, which policy makers are pushing for new teacher evaluations, who designed the tests, or if they’re even reliable or valid.
Corporate reformers and proponents of high stakes testing cry that “we must test-how else will we know what children have learned?” There are a lot ways to answer this statement, but the short answer is this: “Anything. Anything is a better evaluation of student performance than this.” To state there are no other “options” is simply absurd. But it works as a sound bite upon the ears of the public. We comply. Against our better judgment-against what we see and what we hear and what we know. None of us wants to believe that if we were in Milgram’s experiment back in 1961 that we would be the one to sit there and keep pushing the button simply because we’ve been instructed by an authority figure to do so. But would we? We want to believe we’re better than that.
Now here’s the good news. We are. And teachers are too. Right now scores of teachers around the country are fighting back, in places like New York City, Brooklyn, NY, Florida, Colorado , Pennsylvania, Indiana and Texas , just to name a few. So this is a significant sign of hope. Even Milgram pointed out in Experiment Number 17 (he did dozens of variations of his original 1961 study), that when two additional teachers refused to comply, only 4 of 40 participants continued in the experiment. United Opt Out has called for January 7th as Opt Out of High Stakes Testing Day. Visit their website at www.unitedoptout.com to find out how you can stand up and speak out.
As I am writing this it is New Year’s Eve. So for those of you reading this on New Year’s Day or closely thereafter, here’s your New Year’s resolution: Don’t be the research participant who continues to press the button delivering the shocks. As we speak, the voltage is being raised from low to dangerous levels. Children and teachers are crying out even louder now more than ever for the madness to stop. This is no mere test anxiety, no mere fear of being evaluated. It’s a wholesale assault on everything that was ever human or humane about our educational systems.
Question. Challenge. Speak out against the latest wave of policy reforms and high stakes testing initiatives. To simply follow the orders of policy makers and school mandates that do not have the best interests of our children at heart is to do harm. It’s my New Year’s resolution too-that’s why I am writing this. The madness stops when we stop allowing it.
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