| Chapter 1: | Story of the Research |
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Their study included teachers’ views on the effect of proficiency testing on professional job environment, curriculum, student learning behavior and needs, and community relations. With respect to the effect of proficiency testing on teacher autonomy, the authors’ conclusions were similar to those of Rex and Nelson (2004): If reforms are to succeed, then attention must be given to the effect of proficiency on teacher identities. If teacher identity was not considered in the reform equation, then reform was doomed to fail since teachers’ ultimate control will take over. In other words, teachers had the ultimate say in what does and does not happen within the confines of the classroom. This notion is similar to Weatherly and Lipsky’s (1977) description of “street-level bureaucrats” (pg. 172) who end up enacting often overwhelming and cumbersome state or federal policies in the face of often extremely limited resources. In this situation, the street-level bureaucrat is forced to enact the policy and still figure out a way to do his or her job. The result of this is that the policy often functions very differently at the street level than it was intended to function when it was written.
According to Kubow and DeBard (2000), proficiency testing as it is currently mandated was viewed as an “affront to teacher professionalism” and that “teacher professional autonomy and consideration of children’s holistic development have been sacrificed for state-mandated educational accountability” (p. 19). The authors supported this statement by noting that 96% of respondents felt that testing was governmentally imposed with little or no local input. Of those surveyed, 84% of fourth-grade teachers and 79% of fifth-grade teachers claimed that proficiency testing caused excess stress, and 67% of the entire survey population said that proficiency testing has adversely affected faculty morale.