Teaching the test- Some schools gear to MAP

Assessment is a vital part of the learning process. Used correctly, it provides educators a way to track the progress of individual students and guidance on teaching to students' strengths and weaknesses.

Testing also allows school administrators to determine which teachers are effective in the classroom and which need professional development.

But used incorrectly, assessment reflects the worst of public education in our country. It is an ineffective waste of time that does more harm than good.

The Missouri Assessment Program is creeping into the second category.

Visit a new Web site built by teachers from several Kansas City-area school districts: www.umkc.edu/kcrpdc/kcaap.

It's a well-designed, easy-to -navigate Web site.

It is the purpose that is disturbing.

The MAP tests have become such a carrot-and-stick tool that teaching in Missouri has taken on a new, undesirable dimension.

The program would have been fine had it measured core competency.

That's simple enough:

Are Missouri's children learning what they need to be successful in post-secondary education and in life as they progress from grade to grade?

Instead, teachers are under pressure to line up small details of the curriculum so the children are prepared not to learn, but to take a certain test in a certain year.

"There's been a lot of crying on each other's shoulders," Lee's Summit's assessment director said of the curriculum alignment situation.

No doubt teachers around the state are flocking to the Kansas City Web site, which is basically a teacher's guide to getting students to pass MAP tests. It provides teaching tips and sample tests that will measure how well students will score on the real thing.

And most amazingly, the Kauffman Foundation (Ewing Kauffman, a successful Kansas City businessman who died in 1993, owned the Kansas City Royals) is providing $100 stipends to teachers in some schools who take their classes through the sample tests.

If the trend continues, the Missouri Assessment Program soon will assess only two things:

How well certain teachers gear their lesson plans to test taking.

And how many of them want to collect $100 checks.