"Teaching to the test" has become this cliché catch phrase for part of what is wrong with education in America. Teachers are forced to teach to the test, oh my!
This drives me crazy.
Here is how teaching works. First, someone has determined what kids should know in a certain subject at a certain age (say, Ancient Greece in 6th grade). "Someone" means the committee that created the state standards. Next, publishing companies create textbooks to meet these requirements as closely as possible so that schools will select their materials. This includes an assessment (test) to determine if students learned "what they were supposed to" from the chapter/unit/etc.
When I teach a chapter, I look at the test. What is on it? This shows me what the publisher thinks students should take-away from the lesson. I compare that with state/district/school requirements for the unit as well as my own expectations. In some cases, I may add my own questions or replace some questions. I will also have other activities that are evaluated separately from the test. In any event, I have to know what I want students to learn before I can create lesson plans and teach them or provide them with learning opportunities to learn that information.
So in a sense, all teaching is teaching to a test.
The catch phrase is short-hand for teaching to THE standardized test. And worse, to the inaccurate, unfair standardized test. Therein lies the problem. Not teaching to a test, per se, but that teachers focus (too much) time attempting to prepare students for tests that it seems educators or "the public" do not believe are a fair or accurate assessment of student ability. So by spending time on this, we are taking time away from other skills we could be teaching instead.
Teachers will always "teach to a test" part of the time. In most cases, they have some sort of control over the assessment to which they are teaching, creating it to make sure it evaluates students on the facts/skills/etc. that teachers want them to have learned and remembered from a given unit.
