Teaching for the Test

The author in his classroom at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. (Scott Gregory Robinson)

Seeing it slide down a soaped ramp into the Potomac was one of the proudest moments of my teaching career. With a rescue boat bobbing offshore and local TV news cameras on the bank capturing the action, we loaded pairs of kids into the tippy but watertight craft and shoved them away from the bank to paddle a ceremonial 100-yard loop.

A week later, it was time for the final step in the National Board process, as well. My portfolio, every paper clip in place, had been mailed off. Now I had to take a four-hour computerized essay test that would show the depth of my knowledge about teaching high school English. As I headed out my front door, a flash of color caught my eye. A bird's nest in a hanging planter on our porch had three chicks in it; my wife and I had been watching it with our two sons since before the eggs hatched. Just as I was leaving, two of the chicks flew out into the great big world right before our eyes.

"You can do it!" called my wife, as I pulled away from the curb.

A month later, when school was out for the summer, I watched a few of my students talk knowledgeably to tourists at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the Mall, where the canoe sat next to a re-creation of John Smith's shallop. It hit me how much these high-tech kids had learned from building a low-tech boat.

Later that afternoon, a man with a jet-black braid and copper features came by to check out the canoe. "What are you gonna do with that?" he asked, pointing with his chin at the 400-pound boat.

"Maybe make a planter," I joked.

"Can I have it?" he asked. "There's this school, see . . ."

I was talking to Ben Adams, a tribal leader of the Upper Mattaponi of Virginia. He wanted the canoe for the Sharon Indian School in King William County, once a segregated one-room school for Indians until it closed in 1965, and today a historic landmark where Native American kids learn about their past.

Finding a home for the canoe was the perfect ending to this chapter in my teaching career. Translating the magic into some sort of cut-and-dried measure of "student achievement" had always seemed awkward, but at least the portfolio offered a format that let me try.

I like the notion that the National Board evaluation is based on more than standardized test scores, which have come to mean so much in public education. At the same time, I find it ironic that the bottom line for me and the other candidates is itself a test score: 275 is the make-or-break mark. According to the National Board's scoring guide, each portfolio entry and computer center essay is scored on a four-point scale and then converted with a weighted formula. The entries ultimately count for 60 percent of the credit, and the computer center essays make up 40 percent of the overall score.

I could argue that boiling down a year's worth of work to one number is arbitrary, but I agree with the National Board's idea that there has to be a way to identify what the best teachers do that the rest don't. From there, it's a short leap to what should be a no-brainer, but is actually one of education's thorniest issues: rewarding the best. A vocal advocate of merit pay is Nancy Flanagan, a

retired music teacher from Michigan with more than 30 years in the classroom who was recognized as that state's top teacher in 1993.