Teaching to the Test

Joshua Benton, a friend of a friend (it's a one-directional connection, though, so if he sees this he's going to wonder what in God's name I'm talking about), who blogs here, directs readers of his blog to his Dallas News column (subscription required, but log in as deanna[at]earthlink.net, PW: deanna, care of bugmenot) concerning the new writing section of the SAT. Here's the heart of the column:

You'd think writing teachers – used to being shunted aside in recent years while reading and math get all the hype – would be thrilled their subject is getting the extra attention.

But some of them worry that the tests could be encouraging bad writing, not good.

"The risk is that the kind of writing that does well on a test becomes the only kind of writing that gets taught," said Richard Sterling, executive director of the National Writing Project, which trains writing teachers. "It ends up being incredibly reductive, and that does real harm to children."

Here's what I mean: The kind of writing that gets you a high score on most standardized tests isn't necessarily pleasant to read. It's overstructured, stilted and dry.

People have figured this out. For instance, the Princeton Review has analyzed the new SAT writing section to figure out how best to boost the scores of its teenage customers. Its advice: Be boring.

"The grading of these essays is going to be very superficial," said Andy Lutz, Princeton Review's vice president of program development. "It's easy to coach kids how to write in a formulaic way that will score well."

If a kid wants to do well on the test, he says, the key is to write in neat handwriting, have clear structure, and don't take any chances. Attempts to be interesting are at least as likely to be punished as rewarded.

In conclusion, he asks:

"These tests reward you for being straightforward and long-winded," he says. "In the real world, it can be good to take rhetorical chances and write something different. But on these tests, following the formula gets rewarded."

Is that the formula to create good writers?

Elsewhere, I have mounted a spirited attack on the problems inherent in the increasing prominence of standardized tests. Unfortunately, I have done so under my real name, so I can't send you there. It's not terribly important, however, what I said there, because I'm about to contradict myself.

My prior objections have focused on the fact that, with a teacher's tenure and a school's funding tied to students' performance on standardized tests, pedagogical innovation is stifled and education homogenized; time that might be spent tailoring lessons to the particular needs of a given class, according to the inclinations of a professional educator who knows better than anyone the needs of the students before whom he stands each morning, is squandered in ensuring students are prepared to cough up the right answers to multiple choice tests. Weeks, or months, and to a lesser extent entire curricula, are spent teaching to these tests with necessarily unfortunate results. For those of us who have studied for standardized tests -- in my case, most memorably, the LSAT and GRE; I don't recall preparing very intensively for the SAT -- we know that study resources and classes teach one strategies to glean answers one doesn't actually know, to guess intelligently, to massage the epiphenomena of the test into the best possible result, notwithstanding a dearth of actual knowledge or the general irrelevance of the material at hand. Why would it be different when the standardized test in question is administered to younger children, if a teacher's success is evaluated by reference to student test results.

I don't know an educator who doesn't despise this trend, this renaissance in the value placed on standardized tests that recalls the initial enthusiasm for standardized tests that roughly coincided with World War II and the draft. Contrary to what defenders of the testing regime on the right suggest, this antipathy of front-line teachers for the testing regime in my experience has little to do with the fear it engenders in the hearts of the many incompetent teachers the right would have us believe have infected our school systems, but rather arises because teachers are not being allowed to do the things they expected to do as teachers. They are assembly line managers, making sure a given chip is placed in the correct socket. There are other jobs like that; people who study to be teachers didn't want them.

But writing is different than knowledge. Set aside, for a moment, the logistical issues of grading hundreds of thousands of exams each SAT season; we'll assume for purposes of discussion the best case: that each exam is given the tender attention of a trained reader such that creativity might be rewarded. We also can take as granted that what Benton and will probably often agree is good writing also can be effective writing -- like his, for example, and hopefully mine.

My question is, to what extent can we expect schools to take responsibility for turning out good writers, and in what sense? We don't ask elementary schools to turn out good painters or good clarinetists, do we? Writing, as I use the word, principally refers to an artistic endeavor -- even, God willing, in the professional sphere, in law, in journalism, in advertising. Of course, in each of these areas and dozens of others what constitutes good writing varies, but I would submit that a truly talented writer can adapt successfully to virtually any context. Whether I am "truly talented" or not, I have, in my adult life, written everything from lab reports to users manuals to fiction (long and short) to direct mail pieces to corporate annual reports for shareholders to trade magazines and, most recently, law, lots and lots of law. In all of these situations, whatever difficulty I encountered was associated with the non-writing aspects of the position; writing itself is always a pleasure, and in the worst of my professional situations has provided safe harbor in the storm, a few hours out of a miserable day when I can do what I love to do most, negotiating puzzles of expression with nothing in my quiver but words and a vague, often conjectured, sense of audience.

I don't think that can be taught. Not really.

What can be taught, however, is organized thinking and expression. Benton, and others, bemoan the five-paragraph essay most of us remember from school, which is now evidently the format of choice for SAT takers: an Introduction, in which the thesis is set forth and three supporting / subordinate propositions are introduced; three body paragraphs, in which each of these ideas is developed, one to a paragraph, in a way that leads to and supports the thesis, and a conclusion paragraph, which in effect is merely a reconfiguration of the introduction paragraph. There's nothing wrong with this exercise, in my view.

Occasionally, someone accuses me of being a little weird to listen to because I always have an introduction, a middle, and a conclusion when I tell a story or argue a point. Among academics in the humanities, I've found that this morphs into the compliment that I have a good sense of narrative. Such as it is, this is because I often unconsciously adopt something very like the five-paragraph format when I speak.

Sure, it's restricting, but so many other things are in this life as well. A talented writer should have no problem being one of the highest scoring students in a five-paragraph essay-writing endeavor, and an unskilled writer who knows how to follow instructions still, I imagine, will not be scored quite so well. Writers may be made, rather than born, although I'm not convinced -- but in any case, I dare say that writers have been formed long before they sit down to take an SAT, even if they haven't figured it out just yet. The test won't change anything, nor will the teaching to the test that might occupy a significant fraction of the time a junior in high school spends in English class make a good writer a lesser one. The few weeks allocated otherwise, obversely, won't turn a middling writer into a good one.

I think the worst you can say about the putative rigidity of the SAT's new writing section is that there may be a leveling effect, inasmuch as it may be possible for mediocre writers to score highly given adequate preparation. But if they can write an adequate five-paragraph essay, why shouldn't they score well? After all, in real life, talented writers tend not to be valued for their talent, or rather their talent goes largely unexamined. Most positions require writing competency, as do most programs in higher education. If a student can learn how to write a coherent five-paragraph essay, it's safe to send the message to universities that the student is a competent writer, as manifest in a reasonably high essay score on the SAT. And most universities are far more interested in assessing a student's writing competency than anything else, with obvious exceptions for certain departments and programs that center on skillful writing.

I don't retreat from my generalized objection to teaching to tests. It's an insidious consequence of No Child Left Behind, and the general trend toward what is so glibly called "accountability" (would that the government were held accountable for its own poor performance -- say, taking away $100B from the defense budget in years where it is misappropriated to misguided wars or corrupt defense contractors). But I think the issue identified by Benton specifically concerning the new writing requirement of the SAT is a tempest in a teapot.

It's also crucial to remember that the SAT's role is to aid universities in assessing a student's aptitude for advanced study. Most programs require nothing more than the writing competency discussed above. The same people lining up against the writing section now are the ones whom bemoaned the cultural bias and the insufficiency of the purely multiple-choice SAT of old.

Furthermore, nothing I have read makes the current situation sound any different than what I was taught in high school. Sure, I had a creative writing elective along the way, and I was active in my high school's literary magazine (I published more angsty screeds and poetry in my senior year than any other author, and I use the word loosely). I also began to read classics in my AP English course. These were the places I began to learn to write in the artistic sense -- although none of them was as important to my development as a writer as my voracious reading from a young age was. In most of my classes, I learned what Benton derides schools for teaching now -- to communicate the given material concisely and cogently, which is the most important skill for the vast run of people.

It's not that I don't like Benton's column; I do. Furthermore, as a great lover of skillful writing, emotionally I tend to agree with him. Whatever little bit teachers can do to improve students' writing they should do. We're going to be stuck reading reports and memoranda and briefs written by these kids later in our careers; even if they're coherent and grammatical, if they're boring we're going to be pulling our hair out and reminisching about how it was when we were young and on the make, even if our memories are largely confabulated and soft-focus. The reality, however, is that artistic writing, truly creative writing, is and has been and will always be hard to find. And that's got very little to do with the schools, the SAT, or any other easy scapegoat. A lack of literacy that spans the generations, two generations raised on the cathode nipple, these are the culprits. And we can't unring that bell.