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Education critics such as Michael Apple, Diane Rav- itch, and Valerie Strauss often observe how stand- ardized testing takes over school calendars and cur- ricula and thus turns teaching into an exercise in test preparation. These critics, however, seldom mention the moral consequences of over- testing in classes in English language arts (ELA). Each novel, play, or other longer text an ELA class gives up for test preparation is a lost opportunity for moral reflec- tion and growth for our students. Opponents of over- testing, I argue below, should emphasize these moral concerns in our efforts both to cut tests down to size and to support teachers in teaching students as whole people. Both as an ELA teacher and now as a teacher educator, I have seen over- testing undercut ELA’s moral mission, and I believe we have no time to spare in defending our discipline as a venue for students’ moral growth.

By ethics, or morality, I mean people’s diverse ways of defining, debating, and living good lives. In ELA, ethical questions include: In Brown Girl Dreaming, was it good for the young Jacqueline Woodson to decline to say the Pledge of Allegiance? In what ways is Esperanza in The House on Mango Street living a good life (Cisneros)? Who is most to blame for the deaths of Romeo and Juliet (Shake- speare)? In order to answer these questions, students

must reflect on their own beliefs as well as the beliefs of the authors and literary characters under study. When students view texts in light of their own moral ideas, and vice versa, they can refine their moral understandings.

Ethics, writes the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, is bound up with narratives. MacIntyre explains, “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” (216). That is, moral evaluation requires asking who a person is, was, and may become, both as an individual and as a member of groups. Consider how readers of Brown Girl Dreaming might evaluate the ethics of Wood- son’s decision as a young girl not to say the Pledge of Allegiance. In MacIntyre’s view, readers ought to factor in Woodson’s identity at the time as a Jehovah’s Witness and her participation in her faith’s story of serving God in a secular society. To fail to account for Woodson’s story as a Jehovah’s Witness is to limit one’s moral vision. For students to expand their moral vision, then, they must read rich and complex stories of diverse lives.

Students do not broaden their moral horizons by reading the kinds of short, decontextualized passages featured in standardized tests and test- preparation materials. Rather, to grow as people, students must have many opportunities to read longer works of literature with all the twists and turns of ethical life. The moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum states, “[I]t is only by following a pattern of human choice and commitment over a relatively long time— as the novel characteristically does— that we can understand the pervasiveness of such conflicts in human efforts to live well” (37). That is, relative to shorter works, longer texts such as novels and plays can present more material of potential moral relevance, such as details of setting, plot, and character. Additionally, longer stories can show characters’ moral change over time.

ROSS COLLIN Virginia Commonwealth University Richmond, Virginia [email protected]

A Teacher’s Moral Argument against Over-Testing

SPEAKING MY MIND

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20 JULY 2022

A TEACHER’S MORAL ARGUMENT AGAINST OVER-TESTING

Elena Diaz (pseudonym), an ELA teacher I interviewed in spring 2020, describes how her eighth graders talked through ethical questions raised in the young adult novel Ghost by Jason Reynolds. She notes:

The [teenage] title character, he’s been in extreme poverty all his life. He’s now joining this track team where everybody wears

brand- name athletic shoes. And so, one day, on impulse [the main character] steals a pair [of shoes] called Silver Bullets. And I think the price tag was two hundred dollars.

So, with my students, before this, we had eval- uated his character traits and he’s protective, he sleeps by his mother just in case, like, a burglar or something will come in. So, he’s all of these virtuous things. And then when we came to that part [where he stole the shoes], I was like, “Does this make him a bad person? Does this make him a thief?”

And then it was interesting to hear some of the conversations, because one girl had said, “He stole, he’s a thief! Like, it’s black and white. There’s nothing in- between.” And then another [student] is like, “No, you have to look at what prompted him. He’s not— I don’t think he’s going to do it again.” And then we read the book to see if he’s going to continue [steal- ing]. Does stealing one time make you a bad person?

Note how, in order to answer questions about steal- ing and moral character, students considered a range of details from the first part of the story: (1) the main

character lives in extreme poverty; (2) he protects his mother; (3) his teammates wear name- brand shoes; and (4) he steals the shoes on impulse, not as part of a plan. Although one student made a snap judgment— “He stole, he’s a thief!”— Ms. Diaz called students to read

the rest of the novel so they could discover more details and track the main character’s moral growth.

Thus, through reading longer stories, stu- dents can develop not only what Amanda Gulla

calls “reading stamina” (57)— that is, the ability to stick with longer and longer texts— but also moral stamina, or the ability to factor into one’s moral evaluations more and more details about people’s lives and more and subtler forms of change over time. Longer stories— whole stories, not excerpts of stories— are key venues in which students can develop their moral stamina.

If teachers are to guide students in developing their moral stamina through reading longer works, they must have time to do so. To secure time to teach multiple longer stories, we must roll back standard- ized testing and test preparation. At present, testing and test preparation take too much time and, given testing’s increasingly high stakes in local districts and at national levels, tests remake too much of the cur- riculum in their own image. In ELA, for instance, teachers are pressured to devote more and more time to teaching students to read and analyze the kinds of short, decontextualized passages featured on tests. Insofar as longer stories are important venues for moral exploration, reducing the reading of these sto- ries constrains students’ prospects for moral growth.

By speaking in direct and open- minded ways about morality, a topic that the sociologist Andrew Sayer notes is often coded as conservative, critics of over- testing might be able to build the kind of cross- party coalition Michael Apple says is necessary for breaking the hold of the nation’s testing regime. Some parents, administrators, and community mem- bers who are unmoved by aesthetic claims, including arguments that over- testing limits students’ engage- ments with works of literary beauty, may be moved by moral claims, including arguments that over- testing limits students’ engagements with stories that foster moral reflection and growth. Given the poten- tial appeal of moral claims, professional teacher orga- nizations such as the International Literacy Associa- tion and the National Council of Teachers of English should use moral arguments to bring together people of different political persuasions to roll back test- ing and defend ELA as a space for moral formation. Teachers and students stand to gain more opportuni- ties to explore literature and reflect on their efforts to pursue good lives together.

Longer stories— whole stories,

not excerpts of stories— are key venues in which

students can develop their

moral stamina.

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21ENGLISHJOURNAL

ROSS COLLIN/SPEAKING MY MIND

Reynolds, Jason. Ghost. Atheneum, 1989. Sayer, Andrew. Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values,

and Ethical Life. Cambridge UP, 2011. Shakespeare, William. The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of

Romeo and Juliet. The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al., W. W. Norton, 1997, pp. 865– 941.

Strauss, Valerie. “It Looks Like the Beginning of the End for America’s Obsession with Student Standardized Tests.” The Washington Post, 21 June 2020, www.washingtonpost .com/education/2020/06/21/it- looks- like- beginning- end- americas- obsession- with- student- standardized- tests/.

Woodson, Jacqueline. Brown Girl Dreaming. Nancy Paulsen, 2016.

WORKS CITED

Apple, Michael. Can Education Change Society? Routledge, 2012. Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. 1984. Vintage, 2009. Gulla, Amanda N. “Putting the ‘Shop’ in Reading Workshop:

Building Reading Stamina in a Ninth- Grade Literacy Class in a Bronx Vocational High School.” English Journal, vol. 101, no. 5, 2012, pp. 57– 62.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 3rd ed., U of Notre Dame P, 2007.

Nussbaum, Martha. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford UP, 1990.

Ravitch, Diane. Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools. Knopf, 2020.

ROSS COLLIN, an NCTE member since 1998, taught English at West Chicago Community High School in West Chicago, Illinois. Currently, he is a teacher educator in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Virginia Commonwealth University. He serves on the executive board of the Virginia Association of Teachers of English. His research focuses on curriculum theory and the ethical dimensions of literacy.

Teaching Terms Tomorrow when the bell rings, instead of synecdoche and metonymy, we’ll study fear and progress.

We’ll break rules we don’t like and craft new legislation in place of old.

The counterargument will not appear in the third body paragraph, nor the shift two-thirds of the way through the sonnet.

The main character will refuse to undergo fundamental change, words like many, very, and thing will pepper our drafts, passive voice will be used by all, even the strongest among us, and the story will conclude without the hero recognizing her fatal flaw.

—BETSY WOODS

© 2022 BY BETSY WOODS

BETSY WOODS teaches English at Milford High School and the University of Cincinnati Clermont College. She also works with the Ohio Writing Project at Miami University. She has been a member of NCTE since 2007 and can be reached at [email protected]. 

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