VIEWPOINTS
Saturday, April 17, 2021
East Oregonian
A5
SCOTT
SMITH
THE EDUCATION CORNER
The
myths
and facts
of testing
T
esting has become quite contro-
versial in education. We often
hear about students’ test scores
or teachers reporting test results. Then
in social groups, you might experi-
ence people discussing that there is too
much testing imposed on our children
in schools. Is there a misconception?
Depending on your generation and
where you attended school, perspec-
tives on student testing have proba-
bly changed dramatically. Testing in
schools in the past was most often for
determining grades in classes over
material taught by the instructor. Often
those tests were teacher-developed or
may have come with the curriculum,
covering the information taught during
the instruction.
As we have moved to a more mobile
society we have come to expect
students to learn the same mate-
rial, whether in a little country town
or a large city, and no matter what
geographical location, education looks
different than 25 years ago. Publishers
created curricula for all subjects along
with creating tests to ensure that all
students receive the same instruction.
Testing/assessment in education has
changed over the years and we have
also been able to learn more about how
our brains learn and develop, thanks to
science. We have learned that waiting
for a student and allowing additional
time for them to catch up may not be
the best, and may make it even harder
for the child to learn because of what
we now know about brain development.
Then borrowing from the sciences
and using the scientific process of
gaining a baseline, applying theory,
and then checking for change means
education takes a different path.
In education, if the child is not
showing understanding we are now
able to provide specific instruction at
their level and check for understanding
by monitoring, which is often referred
to as testing. If the child understands
the concept, they are ready to move
on; if not, some reteaching is neces-
sary. Past practice often was to assume
students had it because we taught it to
the whole group, or they will catch up
and some will, but many don’t and fall
behind. This is true in both math and
reading.
Moving on and hoping in time they
will catch up is more of a myth than
reality.
Back in the 1970s, publishers were
creating reading materials as fast as
they could. Then they set out to show
how their programs were superior to
teacher-based programs. These curric-
ula provided instructional materials
along with assessments.
During the 1980s, studies were
completed showing if teachers used
and followed their programs students
scored higher. They took their results
to the U.S. Department of Education,
getting them to sign off that teachers
needed to follow the programs with
fidelity.
We have all experienced changes in
the medical field and the impact on our
health and lives. Look at diabetes for
example: Twenty years ago the way we
tested sugar levels is much different
than today. Schools that have embraced
using data to inform education rather
than teaching what a teacher feels is
best have experienced greater student
learning growth. There are not many
people who would want the doctors to
treat their cancer as they did 40 years
ago. The same should be true with how
we educate our youth.
Students are assessed more in
today’s schools than in the past. In
the younger grades, the short screen-
ers used can determine if the student
knows the skill or needs additional
support and are usually less than 10
minutes. As a teacher, having to screen
each student can seem overwhelming
and feel like all they do is test, but the
students are not spending all that time
testing.
The teacher can use that information
to adjust their lessons to give additional
instruction on skills a student might
be struggling with within the curricu-
lum. This allows the student not to fall
behind and keeps their skills moving
forward, whereas in the past students
often fell so far behind that it was hard
for them to catch up with their class-
mates.
———
Dr. Scott Smith has more than 40
years as a Umatilla County educator and
serves on the Decoding Dyslexia-OR
board as their parent/teacher liaison.
Poetry can lift us up in troubled times
BETTE
HUSTED
FROM HERE TO ANY WHERE
I
t’s here again — National Poetry
Month. If you were taught, as poet Billy
Collins joked, that you had to “tie a
poem to a chair and beat a confession out
of it ... to find out what it really means,” you
might flinch at the very idea.
But in this pandemic year, more and
more people have found themselves turning
to poetry not only to help face their pain,
but also to remember moments of light.
Thanks to people who shared some of their
own favorites this month, I found Ashland
poet Angela Howe Decker’s poem about
waking to watch her young boys who have
crept into their parents’ bed “like cats or
friendly spirits” and before dawn are “great
wizards in small bodies, / arms outstretched
above their heads, / drawing deep swells
of breath and / pulling the morning toward
us.”
And January Gill O’Neil’s poem “In the
Company of Women”: “Make me laugh
over coffee, / make it a double, make it
frothy / so it seethes in our delight. / ... Let
the bitterness sink to the bottom of our
lives. / Let us take this joy to go.”
If you’re looking for poems that lift your
spirits, you could try Naomi Shihab Nye’s
“Kindness,” Wendell Berry’s “The Peace
of Wild Things,” or almost anything by Ted
Kooser, who is sharing new poems on Face-
book nearly every day.
Last month, I found myself sitting on the
floor beside the bookcase where I’d shelved
the books I brought home from my moth-
er’s bedroom. Here was Carl Sandburg’s
“Harvest Poems,” complete with the receipt
from my hometown’s Owl Rexall Drug.
Forty-seven cents — the receipt dated
March 21, a day that has since been desig-
nated as World Poetry Day and the same
day, in 2021, that I happened to be reading.
Was it a coincidence that I could hear her
quoting Sandburg, telling the wrens nesting
just above our door, “People of the eaves,
I wish you good morning, I wish you a thou-
sand thanks?”
In “The Pocket Book of Verse” she had
bookmarked “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,”
“To a Skylark,” “Jenny Kissed Me,” and
Robert Frost’s “Two Look at Two.” Again,
I could almost hear her voice, reading that
poem to me when my teenaged life seemed
too much to bear. She is still offering me
guidance; the slip of paper she kept on her
kitchen bulletin board and that is now on
mine reminds me — in lines she copied
from Frost’s poem about a glass of cider —
“I’d catch another bubble if I waited. / The
thing was to get now and then elated.”
Poetry can help us confront hard truths,
too. I think of “Facing It,” Yusef Kumen-
yakaa’s poem about visiting the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial wall. Or this from Joy
Harjo’s “A Postcolonial Tale”: “The chil-
dren were in school / learning subtraction
with guns.”
Wendy Rose’s poem about the Wounded
Knee Massacre — inspired by the art
auction of shirts and leggings and cradle-
boards stripped from those frozen bodies —
gives voice to a mother’s unspeakable grief.
“Would’ve put her in my mouth like a snake
/ if I could, would’ve turned her into a bush
/ or rock if there’d been magic enough / to
work such changes. Not enough magic / to
stop the bullets, not enough magic / to stop
the scientists, not enough magic / to stop the
money.”
What poetry does at its best, I suppose,
is help us address the question Mary Oliver
asks in “A Summer Day”: “Doesn’t every-
thing die at last, and too soon? / Tell me,
what is it you plan to do / with your one wild
and precious life?”
We know this much: Poetry can be a
path toward truth. “Say it plain: that many
have died for this day,” Elizabeth Alexander
reminded us at Barack Obama’s inaugu-
ration. And we won’t soon forget Amanda
Gorman at the podium in January inspiring
a shaken nation. “Let the globe, if noth-
ing else, say this is true, / that even as we
grieved, we grew, that even as we hurt, we
hoped, that even as we tired, we tried.”
Stay strong. And happy National Poetry
Month.
———
Bette Husted is a writer and a student of
T’ai Chi and the natural world. She lives in
Pendleton.
Reduce costs and provide health care for all
RICH
BELZER
OTHER VIEWS
O
ne month ago, I wrote about three
areas in which the U.S. needed to
catch up with the rest of the world’s
wealthy nations — health care, education
and child care for workers. Of these, the
most urgent and obvious area requiring
immediate attention is health care.
Why?
Because we spend twice as much money
as a percent of GDP than the other countries
in the Organization for Economic Coopera-
tion and Development and get worse results.
In addition, they all cover every citizen
while, as of 2019, 28.9 million Americans
were uninsured.
Our results? The U.S. ranks 40th in the
world in life expectancy at birth, 78.5, while
Japan ranks first at 84.3.
The U.S. ranks 37th in the world in life
expectancy at age 60, 83.1, while Japan
ranks first at 86.3.
The U.S. ranks 47th in the world in
infant mortality — 6.5 per 1,000 live births
— behind all of Western Europe and Japan.
Even Russia is better at 5.8 per 1,000 live
births.
I could go on, but you probably get the
message at this point. This country spends
extravagantly on health care as a percent of
our GDP, produces poor results and does
not insure everyone. In fact, according to
a 2019 study by the American Journal of
Public Health, 66.5% of personal bankrupt-
cies in the U.S. are due to medical issues.
Spending more and producing low-quality
results is not a winning formula. The U.S.
health care system can only be described as
the worst of all worlds. Can anyone look at
these facts and disagree?
There are two questions we should prob-
ably be asking ourselves: How did we let
it get this horrible? And, why aren’t our
representatives and senators falling all over
themselves to fix it? If I can get the above
information, we know that they can as well.
First of all, fundamental Republi-
can ideology assumes the free market
“THIS COUNTRY SPENDS
EXTRAVAGANTLY ON
HEALTH CARE AS A
PERCENT OF OUR
GDP, PRODUCES POOR
RESULTS AND DOES NOT
INSURE EVERYONE.”
will always work better than the govern-
ment. In many cases this is true, and is the
foundation for our capitalist system. The
free market works well when competition
restrains prices.
For example, if Chevy priced their
Silverado $20,000 higher than a compara-
ble Ford F-150, they would have a hard time
selling their trucks. In health care, however,
competition is minimal and prices are not
readily available, so cost control is virtually
nonexistent. Imagine that you are at home
in Portland and are hit with an incredibly
painful appendicitis attack. Your wife help-
fully calls the EMTs but, in the meantime,
might you be out on the web trying to find
the hospital with the lowest prices? Is this
information even decipherable?
From a Republican perspective, our
health care system is working exactly as
intended in that it is creating wealth. We
have the highest paid doctors in the world
and our health care companies, up and
down the food chain, are highly profitable.
To Republicans, the fact that we spend more
than other countries, produce miserable
results and leave 28.9 million Americans
uninsured is irrelevant compared to indus-
try profitability.
There has been an attempt at a fix. The
Affordable Care Act was passed and signed
into law by former President Barack Obama
in March 2010. The ACA fell significantly
short of being a total solution, but it did
solve the problem of those who, through
a job change, could not obtain affordable
insurance due to a preexisting condition.
Through its additional funding of Medic-
aid and availability of insurance through
health insurance exchanges, coverage was
expanded by roughly 20 million people.
Unfortunately, it did very little to address
the cost of either services or pharmaceuti-
cals.
The U.S. health care system is obviously
broken; the statistics don’t lie. What should
voters say to any congressman or senator
who isn’t working toward a solution that
reduces costs and provides health care for
all? “You’re fired.”
———
Rich Belzer served as director of federal
marketing for a NYSE-listed computer
company and was subsequently a senior
executive with two NASDAQ-listed high-tech
companies. He moved to Bend to join Colum-
bia Aircraft where he became vice president
of worldwide sales.