Criminalizing basic skills
It used to be that teachers were expected to correct the spelling and punctuation mistakes of their students. Today it can cost them their jobs.
From Kentucky Citizen Digest, Nov, 1997

If someone told you that in Kentucky a teacher could lose her job by making direct corrections to a student paper, you probably wouldn’t believe it. You would think it was a misprint that needed to be corrected.

Think again.

Because of the way Kentucky’s testing system works, teachers are prevented from directly correcting student papers. If, for example, a teacher corrects a student’s paper on what he did on his summer vacation by circling the words and writing the correct spelling or punctuation, the teacher is in violation of the state’s ethics guidelines for testing. She could literally lose her job.

Here’s what Kentucky law says: “Teachers shall not at any time,” says the Code of Ethics for Appropriate Testing Practices for School and District Personnel, “make direct corrections or revisions on a student’s work. Teachers may indicate the position of errors but may not make direct corrections.”

This statement is contained in state regulation 703 KAR 4:110. The regulation has to do with testing. The question is, does it have only to do with testing or actual classroom instruction? Are teachers prohibited from making direct corrections only when tests are being given or on regular classroom assignments. The answer is: “Yes.”

The prohibition on making direct corrections comes in the section of the code which deals with portfolios and which discusses acceptable and unacceptable practices. Interestingly, it is the only prohibition that does not make direct reference to portfolios.

However, the question concerning whether this prohibition applies just to the administration of tests or to regular classroom writing assignments betrays a lack of understanding of how Kentucky’s portfolio program works.

Each portfolio consists of samples of the student’s best work. In other words, any writing assignment that consists of a whole work — a story, essay, poem, etc. — can eventually end up in a portfolio. Since any whole student work can end up in a student’s portfolio, any prohibitions that apply to portfolios will naturally apply to any whole work the student completes as part of a classroom assignment.

In short, the state’s prohibition against making direct corrections to a student’s work does not just apply to what actually appears in the final portfolio that is used in the statewide assessment; it applies to any whole writing piece a child completes in his or her schoolwork.

Furthermore, a teacher who violates this prohibition — in other words, a teacher who makes a direct correction to a student paper — is subject to state investigation. If found guilty, he or she can not only be fired, but is subject to criminal prosecution.

In other words, a teacher who makes direct corrections to a student’s paper is considered a criminal in the state of Kentucky.

It is easy to see why the state would want to get tough on teachers who tamper with the work a student has done in completion of a test. As Starr Lewis, the head of Kentucky’s writing program asks, “If we were administering a CTBS test, for example, would we want teachers walking around the room filling in the bubbles on the children’s answer sheets?”

The answer, of course, is “No.” The question, however, is whether we want teachers to be able to show children how to correctly spell and punctuate their writing in regular classroom assignments. The contention of KERA supporters has always been that teaching to Kentucky’s statewide test, whatever the test’s reliability problems, is good for instruction. But is instruction helped when teaching to the test requires that teachers be prohibited from showing students how to write correctly?

Some people think so.

In fact, to some professional education theorists, the best way to teach children in any subject is to let them discover things for themselves. This is part and parcel of the “whole language” method of writing instruction. The whole language methodology has become infamous over the last several years as it is applied to reading. California, for example, made headlines earlier this year for abandoning the whole language approach to reading, with its deemphasis on phonics and its stress on word guessing. The implementation of whole language instruction in California sent the state to the bottom in national reading comparisons.

In Kentucky, the whole language approach to both reading and writing has dominated elementary instruction since KERA was passed in 1990. This approach to writing, sometimes referred to as the “writing process” approach, stresses letting a child discover the rules of grammar, spelling and punctuation on his own. According to this theory, children learn best when they have information withheld from them.

Proponents of this approach claim it is based on research. In education, however, every new fad is said to be “based on research.” Much of the research, however, is based on anecdotal studies. These studies cite individual cases of teachers using the approach who claim to have success with it. Actual scientific studies are hard to come by.

This approach is the subject of controversy among professional educators. Some teachers, for example, think direct corrections of students work has positive educational benefits; others think not.

The question is, should one approach to writing instruction be mandated from Frankfort? That is the effect of the state’s policy on corrections to student work in the portfolio program: whole language or “writing process” writing instruction is, for all practical purposes, mandated, since teachers are not allow to make direct corrections.

We can all have our opinions on what is and isn’t good instruction. But are we going too far when we outlaw giving direct help to students?
 

Key Family Foundation Contacts: Kent Ostrander, Executive Director Martin Cothran, Senior Associate Policy Analyst