This School Is About Kids

This article includes concerns of K-12 principals about the culture of constant assessment, including these questions: Have testing and its accompanying preparation, administration, and reporting functions hijacked our schools' agendas? If "what you test is what you teach," has the accountability agenda also imprisoned curriculum and instruction? And, most important, What is our work and our responsibility to the broader society as school leaders? How do we pursue that work in light of current realities? All at the principals' gathering agreed on several perspectives: the "render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's" approach applies. Standardized measurement of learning through psychometric data is currently required by law, policy, and practice; and it is here to stay. Educators need to pay this measurement system its due. Assessing students' learning is essential. No Child Left Behind obliges us, appropriately, to pay additional attention to the achievement of specific subgroups of students. We are also obliged to adapt testing to better serve students, which means being careful to foster and assess learning not covered on the test. To manage this paradox, principals need to plan time for personal and professional reflection as well as for ongoing conversations among fellow educators about the essence of their work as leaders. Principals talk about children in their schools, noting that their essence cannot be condensed into efficiently scored, disaggregated data. Data tools are useful. But even a dramatic increase in test scores headlined in the newspaper must not become the end product of our educational endeavors. What's going on in the hearts and minds of our students must always make the headlines of teachers' attention.