From the Editor: Do we have to choose between teaching and testing?

You often hear the term “high stakes” in discussions of public education. Mostly it’s used to described the standardized tests on which our teachers, schools and students are judged.
But everything about education, the future of our children, is high stakes. So it’s natural that there would be controversies and sharp disagreements about schools from time to time.
One of the most recent involved Wyandotte Elementary and a concept called “departmentalization.”
That’s a big word for something familiar. It has to do with who teaches whom.
For many of us of a certain age, school worked this way:
In elementary school, you had one teacher all day. In junior high, maybe you had one teacher most of the time, but you moved around a little for gym class, or band, or music and art classes when those were still considered important.
Then came high school, where you had a different class every hour with a different teacher who specialized in that subject. We didn’t know it then, but high school was departmentalized.
You may have noticed that standards and expectations have been raised in recent years. As part of that process, the word came down from the St. Mary Parish public school administration that departmentalization would be extended all the way down to classes serving children as young as 5.
Wyandotte Elementary was slow to implement departmentalization for its youngest students. The district administration insisted. Some people objected.
The district administration won. In theory, specialization will help teachers prepare those youngsters for the high-stakes testing that begins in third grade.
A lot of things get wrapped up in the debate. It was about whether the parish administration or the principal should have that level of control at a local school. It was about holding on to the way we think schools should be.
Mostly, it was about how far we’re willing to go in pursuit of ever-higher scores on standardized tests. Is it worth tinkering with the bond between teacher and student, or replacing the individual talent of teachers with a state-approved script?
This problem is even tougher than your child’s Common Core homework.
On one hand, we have our own memories of teachers who made a difference in our lives — teachers like Florence Kinder, affectionately known as Flossie, who taught English and Latin in the largely German-American community where I grew up.
Mrs. Kinder was already close to retirement when I took Latin I. She was a tiny, gray-haired lady who had a classical academy education. She spent her days teaching Brandts, Meyers and Deckers about the Romans who tried to civilize Germanic tribes.
The irony soaked in later.
Occasionally, she’d stop a discussion of conjugations and declensions to rebuke the barbarians in the city government who couldn’t fix the roads — the Romans were great road-builders, you know — or buy a bust of Homer for the Latin classroom.
Flossie was a hoot.
Another teacher from that high school, Jeff Taylor, was the school newspaper adviser when I was on the staff.
That was almost 45 years ago. I haven’t made a dollar doing anything else since.
Everyone reading this has memories like that. We’d hate to see talented teachers, teachers who have the power to make lives better, reduced to script-readers who can only, in a phrase that has become a curse, teach to the test
The other side is that we depend on our schools more than almost any other public institution, and we need results.
St. Mary is an over-performer in the Louisiana Department of Education accountability system. We rank in the top third of Louisiana parishes despite a disproportionately large number of students from homes judged to be low-income. All three east St. Mary high schools have earned A grades.
In this time of transition for St. Mary’s economy, highly ranked public schools are vital.
Good schools — schools that can demonstrate they’re good — raise home values. When employers look around for places to move, good schools are one of the things they’re looking for.
Fairly or otherwise, test scores are the measure we have. St. Mary may be doing well compared to other Louisiana parishes, but Louisiana ranks poorly among the states, and the nation trails the educational performance in much of the rest of the Western world.
If we’re serious about improving education, standards have to go up. And that requires changes.
It would be nice to think we can show by objective measure that schools are getting better without doing away with our teachers’ ability to inspire young hearts and minds. We’re struggling to learn how to do that.
In the meantime, we’re putting a big burden on some small shoulders.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review.