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Testing, Assessment, and the Teaching of Writing Gregory Shafer Mott Community College Language Arts Journal of Michigan Volume 31 | Issue 1 Article 7 2015 Testing, Assessment, and the Teaching of Writing Gregory Shafer Mott Community College Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/lajm Recommended Citation Shafer, Gregory (2015) "Testing, Assessment, and the Teaching of Writing," Language Arts Journal of Michigan: Vol. 31: Iss. 1, Article 7. Available at: https://doi.org/10.9707/2168-149X.2094 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@GVSU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Language Arts Journal of Michigan by an authorized editor of ScholarWorks@GVSU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CRITICAL PEDAGOGY Testing, Assessment, and the Teaching of Writing GREGORY SHAFER “As standardized testing has swallowed up public education in the U.S. in the A Quick History of the Fight twenty-first century, its ravenous hunger intensifying yearly since the federal man- for Composition Classrooms date inaugurated by President Bush’s No Child Left Behind and perpetuated by President Obama’s Race to the Top, students have largely become test takers.” In the 1980s, when I was in col- —Robert Hatch lege and learning to teach English, the goal was to transcend narrow tests, to omewhere in our journey to elevate the progress and educational move beyond the constricting peda- achievement of our most challenged students, many of us who teach gogy that centered on numbers and composition have watched with consternation as our most revered theo- multiple choice exams. It was a time of ries of writing have melted away into yet another reason for testing and exciting research, much of it galvanized excessive accountability. With all of the good intentions that accompany by a movement away from prescrip- Sthe social worker or moral crusader, politicians and school administrators have tried tive, teacher-driven writing. Macrorie to convince us that rigid testing and placement help students to achieve more and spoke of new, more personal ways to become successful. do research, Bruner emphasized learn- And so, instead of portfolios and process we have Race to the Top, Common ing through discovery, and books like Core, and No Child Left Behind. By the time they reach college, writers have been Banesh Hoffman’s Tyranny of Testing fully acculturated into a system that measures skills and prescribes form, placing po- exhorted instructors to avoid the limi- litical games and academic literacy above self-actualizing communication. Perhaps it tations of testing and its tendency to is grounded in the frustration of seeing so little concrete progress among develop- usurp the language experience from mental or beginning writers, but in many classrooms across our country—includ- classrooms. Above all, there was a call for cultivating a writing program that ing my own department at Mott Community College—testing and placement have focused on the process, on the journey, usurped student freedom and transformed many writing classes into prescriptive on the self-actualization that occurred places where teachers teach grammar, use standardized books, and are expected to when one wrote in a progressive class- follow uniform rubrics for success. It is a lamentable result of best practice being room. supplanted by a confused political expediency. One of the most prominent voices How could this have happened? Where did it all begin? How did all of those in the 1980s was Stephen Tchudi, whose lofty discussions in graduate school about a process approach that would liberate books focused on the inimical effect of the student become a battery of tests that we somehow find not only palatable but the Back to Basics Movement and the preferable? It is tempting to suggest that it has never left—that testing and a top- pressure placed on teachers to standard- down approach to writing have always been present in our classrooms, either linger- ize their classrooms. In his 1980 book, ing in the periphery or standing at the head of the class. Such a theory would not be The ABCs of Literacy, Tchudi provides unreasonable, considering the fact that while composition programs have spent the a list of thirteen reasons why tests do last five decades advocating a process and post-process approach to the teaching of not work, suggesting that we distinguish writing, most political and educational bureaucrats have pushed a curriculum that between testing and evaluation and places numbers and skills as the goal of a successful education. It is a historical and reminding readers that “the question ideological tug-of-war that has left many of us filled with consternation. is not whether teachers will evaluate LAJM, Fall 2015 39 Testing, Assessment, and the Teaching of Writing growth in literacy, but how” (p. 150). In focus on the writers, their growth terms that teachers were not doing their other words, nobody is against assess- through language, and the general no- jobs and that schools must do more to ment, but that does not mean we have tion that writing could become a part secure the nation’s security. Of course, to test, that does not mean that we con- of their existential linguistic experi- the main efficacy of the document was tort literacy evaluation into a regime that ence. Donald Graves was studying the its political and international theme. alienates students and makes them into acumen of young language users, and This was not simply another attack on robotic test takers. Denny Taylor was celebrating her book schools but on their failure to protect That was 1980. Two years earlier, Family Literacy—a work that evinced the the country by producing enough smart Peter Elbow had galvanized many in natural and totally social aspects of lan- people to win the Cold War. It was the writing world with his book Writing guage acquisition and growth. For per- clearly no accident that the conservative without Teachers (1978), a small, simply- haps the first time, teachers were being report couched everything in terms that written book that celebrated composi- told that language pedagogy was best related to Cold War rhetoric: tion as discovery, as imagination, as a taught from a bottom-up approach, one If an unfriendly foreign power had personal exploration. Elbow had been that focused on writers and the inherent attempted to impose on America influenced by Donald Murray and the abilities they brought to the classroom. the mediocre educational perfor- entire Expressivist position, which ar- mance that exists today, we might gued that writing was about personal well have viewed it as an act of war. Politics and Language empowerment and artistic vision. When As it happens, we have allowed it Instruction: Now You’re in Murray (1978) wrote that “the most ac- to happen to ourselves (as cited in- Real Trouble curate definition of writing, I believe, is Long, p. 11). that it is the process of using language In the midst of the linguistic and As a teacher in 1984, I was witness to discover meaning in experience and pedagogical euphoria—one that sug- to the impact of A Nation at Risk and to communicate it,” (1978 p. 122) he gested a paradigm shift--came Ronald the transformative influence on all that was suggesting that writing was a per- Reagan’s A Nation at Risk (1984). For I had learned and come to understand sonal act of creation and self-discovery. some reason unknown to any of us in graduate school about language learn- It was not, in contrast, about test scores, in graduate school, the writers of this ing. Suddenly, there was little room or impersonal school objectives, or stan- highly political and oftentimes incendi- patience for creative writing or portfo- dardized versions of literacy. ary document had not gotten the memo lios. Tests were again being stressed, and Later Elbow would be joined by about process and humanistic learning. the new word around the high school the social constructivists, who argued Indeed, A Nation at Risk was written in where I taught was accountability. that writing could not be removed from military terms, arguing that not only was When I submitted lesson plans, the social and political winds that forev- our educational system feckless and ir- my department chair examined them er imbued it with meaning. Paulo Freire responsible but was also endangering for skills being covered and the atten- (1988), Henry Giroux (2006), and Ira our entire country. One needs only to tion paid to tests that would later be Shor (1999) would contend that writ- read the opening lines to feel the puni- given. For someone who had just left ing—and education in general—had to tive and paternalistic tone of the docu- a graduate program at Michigan State militate against a “banking system” that ment: University—where my advisor had been inexorably removed it from its demo- Our nation is at risk. Our once editor of English Journal—the transi- cratic and egalitarian moorings. unchallenged preeminence in tion was nothing short of apoplectic. The 1980s was an incredibly ex- commerce, industry, science, and Like Dorothy, who realizes she is not citing time to be a graduate student in technological innovation is being in Kansas anymore, I learned within composition studies. Just a decade re- overtaken by competitors through- months of my first high school teach- moved from John Dixon’s Growth through out the world. (as cited in Long, ing job that countervailing winds were English and the Dartmouth Conference, p. 10). blowing through the language arts class- we were immersed in the optimism of The response to A Nation at Risk room. One was the voice of research a more humanistic approach to teach- could hardly be predicted.
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