Knowledge Is Good

In mourning (sort of) last weekend after Dartmouth College announced its famed fraternity system would be going coed, I rented "Animal House," the movie inspired by Dartmouth's most rowdy frat, fictionally dubbed Delta Tau Chi. It's a great film--crass, yes, but incredibly brilliant and witty. One of the best scenes involves the bumbling but evil Dean Vernon Wormer calling in the leadership of the less-than-academically inclined Delta House and informing them that because of their poor grades, they have expelled because, unknown to them, they have been on "double-secret probation."

A few ski runs down from Hanover, NH to Boston, MA, we have our own Dean Wormer in the form of Governor A. Paul Cellucci, who seems to think the teachers of Massachusetts are no better than the Delta frat boys. He has been holding teachers and teacher candidates on double-secret probation since the institution of a competency exam last spring, blasting away on his ceremonial, Silber-plated whistle.

Last week, a team of three education experts released a report announcing the exam is an inaccurate indicator of teaching ability and should be scrapped in favor of something better. The analysts worked only with the scores of the April and June administrations of the test, since the State Board of Education, with the oversight and prompting of Cellucci, has refused to release copies of the actual test questions. (Education program heads were invited to see, but not take or study, the test under prison-like conditions earlier this fall. No writing utensils were allowed in the room, and the program leaders had to sign an oath of silence in exchange for a glimpse of the exam). Such a system gives a whole new meaning to double-secret probation.

But despite the lack of access to the exam questions, education writer Anne Wheelock, Boston College Professor Walter Haney and Salem State College Professor Clarke Fowler managed to find enough discrepancies in the scores themselves (coupled with interviews of test-takers) to declare the test an unfair indicator of teacher preparation.

Among their more striking conclusions: The test has triple the degree of error of the SAT's; there is great variance between the writing and reading scores of some candidates (an unusual result, since both sections are supposed to measure verbal skills); and finally, there are remarkably inconsistent scores from those who took the test twice. Add to these findings the reports from some test-takers that the administration of the exam was disorganized and inconsistent, and it would seem worth re-evaluating this exam by actually seeing what it looks like.

Instead, Gov. Wormer--er, Cellucci--has decided to press ahead with this competency exam and add to it by testing current teachers under a similar plan, firing those who don't pass. His response to the report by the three education experts was as follows:

"This is a smokescreen because they don't like teacher testing. These are the same people who would say, 'Well, we're going to pass Johnny to the fourth grade because we don't want to give him a failing grade because it might affect his self-esteem.' So then you put Johnny in the fourth grade and promote him to the fifth grade, and then he gets socially promoted to the teacher college. And then when he gets his teaching degree, he can't pass a literacy test. I don't go along with that. That's the old way of doing things. We're doing it the new way."

While we can all agree that the quality of education in this state and across the country needs vast improvement--and that teacher competency exams are a necessary component of any education reform--Cellucci's comments about the teachers of this state continue to reveal a scornful and intractable attitude which would make him a terrible teacher, never mind someone overseeing an entire educational system. The knee-jerk prejorative hyperbole he uses on the topic of teacher-testing is disturbing both because of what he says and the venom with which he seems to say it. He has chosen the immediate gratification of political sound-bytes over the long-term good of the educational system, and it's frightening.

It's as if Cellucci has borrowed a line directly from Wormer's lips: "The time has come for someone to put his foot down. And that foot is me." He views our state's teachers (and those training to become teachers) as little more than frat boys to be disciplined until their organization can be disbanded (I bet the Massachusetts Teacher Association has the same reputation in the governor's office that Delta did at fictional Faber College). Of course, in the movie it is Dean Wormer who says, "I'll decide what's fair and what's not fair".

Finally, the governor seems to forget that teachers are not the enemy but the answer. When trained properly, they are indispensable to the education of Massachusetts' children. Testing prospective teachers and now, possibly, current teachers with unfair exams will only drive away the best and the brightest from the profession. If Cellucci's "new way" consists of unreasonable secrecy and a constant barrage of uninformed insults, maybe we need a new dean/governor, one who remembers the not-all-that ironic motto of Faber: "Knowledge is Good." Susannah B. Tobin '00 is a classics concentrator in Lowell House. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.