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Both Kentucky and Vermont are states where the consequences of the assessment system are focused somewhere other than on the students, if at all. In Kentucky, stakes are felt at the school level, and in Vermont, it is less clear that the effect of a school's performance on the state assessment, which is published, is felt by any particular actor. In speaking with teachers and administrators in both these states, it became clear that one of their main challenges is getting students motivated for the courses or the state assessment when these forms of accountability do not hold any meaning for them.
They Don't Take the Tests Seriously Similar to schools in New York and Texas where there are high stakes for students, schools in Kentucky and Vermont experience frustration at getting students motivated for state assessments and interested in their performance. For instance, teachers at Binghamton, the target school in Kentucky, talk about sharing the school's scores with the students. When asked how students reacted to their school not doing well on the state assessment, one teacher said they were “Nonchalant. Just-'Oh, well.'” Teachers at both Binghamton and Baleford talked about some of the reasons they think students are not motivated for this assessment. As one teacher at Baleford recalls, students have little ownership in taking the state assessment: “…I'll be honest with you, in the past, when the kids did the old KIRIS, it was basically done in either eleventh and twelfth, it's kind of moved about, it started with twelfth and kind of moved back to eleventh. The kids did not really have any ownership in it and basically they performed for us and that was it. I mean they did it out of a respect and a liking for us and so on, more than anything. And now with the testing going on [at] all levels, it's, I think, a little bit more difficult with kids. Ninth graders, they see no value in it whatsoever.” At Binghamton, motivation is a similar challenge. There, teachers say the students do not care about their CATS scores. Teachers say students think, “Why do I care what my CATS score is?” At Baleford, when asked about students' perspectives on the test, the principal said that students are not held accountable. “And because they are not held accountable, that means that they see it as a joke.” These problems are further complicated because of the timing of the score release. As one Binghamton teacher said, “The fact is, the students aren't accountable for their scores. The scores come back too late to use them for or against a student. I mean if you have a student sleep through all this test, the year's over. We got individual scores for last year's test, about a month and a half ago maybe. So it's like a year behind on the reporting, so you can't use the scores for anything, because it's already gone.” At Binghamton, there was also a feeling as with the New York students, that students were not aware of the accountability policy and Kentucky's reform in general. One teacher said, “I don't think most of them really understand, you know, the standards and all that. They do understand that as a school we're being evaluated based on our scores.” In examining teacher talk about this problem, it seemed that the lack of seriousness surrounding the test was widespread among students. However, one Binghamton teacher clarified how pervasive the problem really was: “I would say that maybe 20 to 25 percent of the kids really don't take it seriously. Most of the other kids do try. But I think there has to be a better way to test them, so that they can see that it is important. I mean, we can stand up here and say that it's really important that you try your best on this test, but that's not enough sometimes.” Faced with this problem of motivation, many teachers in Kentucky schools are turning toward strategies that provide incentives for students to do well on the exam (Siskin and Lemons 2000). When asked what happens in the school when testing occurs and whether students were nervous about the change in the test in Kentucky, the principal said, “Students don't really care. They don't react like us [the teachers and administration].” As a result, the school turns to a system of external rewards and recognitions to try to motivate students to take the state assessment seriously and do well on it. “And so we got to do a lot of bells and whistles and, you know, do dances for them, and all that kind of stuff, to get them excited about learning.” Incentives to get students excited about the assessment and learning in general take many forms, including tying it to what students care about and how school fits into their lives. As one Binghamton teacher recalls, You find out what they have to go through…and you can understand in a hurry why some of these kids are not that motivated to come into a classroom. They know they're coming in here and getting a meal in the morning, they're getting a meal in the afternoon. So they're getting lunch and breakfast taken care of, and other than that they just want to survive. So the academics are just something where we've got to figure out a way of making them think it's a little bit more important…and so they're just putting in time trying to get through high school. Some of them are not really worried about trying to get through high school, they're just trying to get till they're old enough to get out of high school. There's a lot more going on than what I even know.
Other mechanisms for motivation are more tangible and tied to the school culture, and include rewards and penalties for performance. Some rewards include free time, pep rallies, a relaxed dress code, exemption from final exams, free food, prom passes, and recognition. The principal at Byrd recounts their strategy at a rally they held to motivate students to do well on CATS: “Last year we rented these sumo wrestling things you blow up. It makes a guy. Two of my teachers came out… And we had last year's score and then this year's goal. That was your number on the back. Sumo wrestlers don't have numbers, but who cares. And so they did some kind of fake wrestling match and, of course, the new goal won, just anything to be funny.” Penalties for poor performance include a decreased grade in a class or on a test and a withheld driver's permit. Grades were very important to students. As one Byrd teacher said, “This is a very grade motivated school and notice I didn't say knowledge motivated, I said grade motivated. And some of these kids will do any thing to get a good grade on something.” Helping students understand what they need to know and that they were capable of performing well on the assessment was a recurring theme in most of our states. The Byrd principal noted how they let students know they have support. We also go around to the mayor, we go to the university's basketball coach, if there are any celebrities cutting through the city, we'll get them on a thirty second tape saying, “Look, I've heard about your school, good luck I know you can do this.” And, thus, we splice it all together and we show about a fifteen minute video to let them know it's important… But do you know that it takes all of our energy to get these kids to do their best. We don't have to do that on the driver's permit test. We don't have to remind them to bring pencils. We don't have to do anything. They'll study. And the same thing with the ACT, we don't have to.
Indeed, most prevalent in conversations with teachers and administrators in states like Kentucky, where the stakes are located elsewhere, was the issue of motivation and the need for students to see the state assessment as meaningful to their lives. As a Baleford teacher says, Until it's a part of their accountability, they're not going to take it seriously. That's very distant for them. You know, if I get this on the score. Well it's very distant for them. And all their lives they've been tested, tested, tested. It doesn't mean anything. It didn't mean anything to me when I was there. It didn't mean anything to me until I went to regular college…I think it's good to have standards to which you're working, but I think kids need to be a part of the process and need to know, need to see it as a value to them. You can't force feed anybody anything. I know from my own experience. I taught senior English the last four or five years that I taught. And when the kids saw it as an integral part of their lives, what we were dealing with, I had no problem getting them to even read Hamlet. You know, reading Hamlet, they could see what it was all about, the connection. In summary, teacher talk about how students respond to the state assessment system when the stakes are not located on them was somewhat similar to how they talk about students when they are the recipients of the consequences. Issues here concern student motivation about the test, which was more prevalent in states with no stakes for students, particularly with the use of incentives and the need to connect the content to what students care about. What was quite different was the absence of any discussion around testing anxiety, teaching to the test, and focus. Integrating student voices into a discussion of accountability in Kentucky or Vermont, would, no doubt, enlighten this further.
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