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“School accountability” and standardized testing: training a generation of trivia masters |
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Read More About it: Robert Koehler editorial: “Forced march through right-answer land” |
It’s an old debate, but apparently the establishment still hasn’t “got it.” The test-driven education culture of the NCLB Act is a headlong plunge in the wrong direction. It attempts to solve a complex problem with a blunt instrument.
Does an education consist of learning a certain set of facts? Or in the training of an agile mind? Standardized testing is a crude instrument that measures the wrong things, and measures them poorly to boot.
It is true that bad schools tend to deliver low test scores and good ones (usually) deliver good test scores, but the tests are based on a false set of assumptions about the existence of a necessary corpus of knowledge, the desireability of everyone memorizing that corpus, and the relationship between that ‘knowledge’ and the ability to perform critical thinking tasks.
I would rather see a whole class period used debating about the meaning of one fact in context than memorizing a hundred facts for a high-stakes test.
You could say we’re trying to train people to perform well at the game of ‘Jeopardy’ but poorly at the game of life, where problems are fantastically complex, value judgements have to be made, and real diversity of opinion must be understood. Life isn’t an episode of Jeopardy - people actually have to be able to do something with the things they know.
When you attempt a big social change, it’s important to ask, “What if we succeed?” The answer might be very useful, if only as a warning:
What if we succeed in reforming our schools so that kids actually get better scores on standardized tests? It's a good 'unintended consequenses' question. Suppose we really pull it off and kids actually start scoring higher on those tests the refomers are so fond of?
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One good outcome may be that we will have taught kids to stick with a difficult task even when the relevance to their lives isn't immediately apparent. That would be a good thing - almost the only good thing.
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We would also create children obsessed with getting the "right answer." In a complicated world, the right answer, the safe answer, the pre-approved answer can be a prescription for disaster, or at least for irrelevance.
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We would create risk-averse children who would be loathe to chance anything "off the beaten path." Time to persue the new idea? Forget it - the big test is coming! Non school-sponsored personal interests? No way!
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This country was built by people who went beyond the "right answer" and who were not "well-rounded." The highest achievers didn't "fit in." In fact, many were of only average or even substandard academic achievement. How lucky we all are that someone didn't try to 'fix' them.
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Standardized tests presuppose a certain body of knowledge that we could count on to glue society together, but that corpus is an illusion. Information is cheap, but clarity is priceless. You can find out anything in seconds today, but the value lies in thinking about what the information means, clearly expressing your conclusions, and having the courage to act on what you know.
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What sort of classes lend themselves to the need? English. Art. Music. Drama. Philosophy. Even mechanical arts. All the classes getting short shrift as we train a generation of trivia masters.
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Even Japan, with its longtime obsession with test-taking, is starting to take a second look and trying to steer its education juggernaut towards fostering creativity and clarity. Apparently their economy is suffering from a lack of innovation. They should be an object lesson to us: Years ago when they were trying to raise test scores, no one asked, "what if we succeed?"
- George Wiman
Blog from August 03, 2003
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