“Renegade Teacher: Inside School Walls with Standards and the Test” is a memoir about working with students and teachers, standardized testing, and how schools can work better to raise the level of learning. This is especially necessary, writes author Dr. Katherine Scheidler, in today’s post-COVID world, because 1 million youth, she writes, have left school, and learning has been set back by decades. Scheidler, who’s been coming to the Island since the 1970s, shares that Harvard Professor Martin West has stated, “We have the biggest decline in student achievement in U.S. history. We have to have strategies to overcome this.” And Scheidler puts forth how standardized testing can help bring this about by providing knowledge of where learning is occurring, and where it needs to be improved.
Scheidler takes us along on her career journey of more than 25 years as an urban classroom teacher, and over 15 years as a school system’s leader of teaching and learning, to explain how the standards and the state tests are good — for everyone. As an assistant superintendent, or district curriculum director, in Massachusetts, Sheidler helped guide the state standards and tests from their start in the Clinton era of new accountability legislation through their changes over the course of subsequent administrations. She writes in the book, “I show how it’s not simply a test hurting many, or wasting time, but instead provides useful learning goals and a gold mine of information for students, educators, and parents … A student’s score isn’t made public or sent off to colleges … The state test simply assesses for needed areas that help even higher-achieving students, and helps bring basic common learning to all, including those students formerly forgotten and marginalized. Now everyone counts.”
Scheidler gives us examples of how, as she says, educators working alone, in pairs, in small groups, or in a district-wide effort, use the test to boost learning. “Does having the test mean a bit more work? Yes, one has to think about how to integrate the needed learning into one’s courses. But the benefits for education equity are great. I also show how we can modify ways of working to do even better,” Scheidler writes.
She offers her own experience of the positive changes that came about when she went from a traditional approach of teaching multiple courses, five classes a day, with more than 100 students to a new method with two longer classes a day, rotating daily, half the number of students, and focusing on a single course. Scheidler writes in a recent email, “I thought: Now I can teach. This more sane use of time worked extremely well with urban students and teachers. We were no longer wet dishrags, our brains mush, at the end of a school day. I want readers to see we have to rethink the school day to help teachers and students reach higher levels of learning, especially with COVID setbacks.”
Scheidler wrote “Renegade Teacher” for the general public and for those interested in current issues in schools, as well as for educators and administrators. She says, “From hearing so often people both in schools and outside of school slamming testing, I finally felt I had to try to help people better understand the test as just an outside, more objective assessment of learning.”
One of the key takeaways for Scheidler is that before testing, not all students were given a fair shake in education. Teaching was random and idiosyncratic. She explains that this is less so now in Massachusetts, and in other states where people paid attention to test results as a sign of common learning for all students, not only those with more privileged home lives.
Throughout her book, Scheidler conveys her respect for dedicated teachers. She wants readers to understand how challenging school is, and how valuable teachers are, and also that the test isn’t punitive but rather a good test of literacy and math skills. Furthermore, she feels that the old-school system of the early 1990s, when teaching was similar to an assembly-line approach, should change to meet today’s challenges. Scheidler reflects, “We can’t put new wine in old bottles. The system has to change. This sense of fairness in learning now permeates many schools. This is a very big-deal change that’s happened as a result of having every student tested. It’s a major accomplishment.”
“Renegade Teacher: Inside School Walls with Standards and the Test,” by Dr. Katherine Scheidler. Available at Island bookstores. For more information about Dr. Katherine Scheidler, visit kayscheidler.com. Scheidler will speak at the Vineyard Haven library on Tuesday, August 8, at 5:30 pm.
