Will

This is about as succinct an argument against standardized tests as I’ve come across yet. Written by William Wraga, a professor in the program in educational administration and policy at the College of Education, University of Georgia, it’s in response to the cheating scandal now rocking the Atlanta Public School System, and it clearly lays out the case that we are not doing much to assess our kids’ knowledge OR promote a learning disposition when we use them.

Research has found that when high-stakes tests are used:

1. Educators will teach to the tests.

2. Curriculum narrows to that which is on the test.

3. Instruction narrows to skill-drill test prep.

4. Academically disaffected students are more likely to drop out of school.

5. The pressure to raise scores in the face of severe sanctions increases the incidence of unethical behavior.

Research has not found sufficient evidence to support the notion that implementing high-stakes tests will improve student learning. In short, research suggests that high-stakes testing accountability measures not only will not improve education, but also may actually undermine education. Why would we enact a policy that would do that to educators and students?

Even without the research, this isn’t rocket science, is it? Very little of what we test is useful knowledge to any individual child, and we basically have no idea to what extent students can build on that knowledge nonetheless. It’d be nice if we trusted teachers a bit more to do that. 

(Do take a moment to read this reply to get the gist of the dysfunction in our thinking about this. The system is just doing a horrible job of teaching critical thinking, obviously.)

Yong Zhao has an interesting series of posts on how cheating scandals around standardized tests are growing and becoming, for all intents, an important part of the why we should get rid of them argument.

The evidence is clear. Test-score cheating is not isolated to Atlanta, Baltimore, and a few other schools, as testing proponents tend to suggest. It is not a problem that can be fixed with technical measures such as tightened security. It may be human nature but it is the high and unreasonable pressure of high-stakes standardized testing that leads to corruption. Thus, we cannot minimize the problem, trivialize potential solutions, or blame a few educators who have been caught. The Atlanta scandal should serve as a wake-up call to all of us, especially to those who continue to promote testing as a necessary and effective way to improve education.

He goes on to summarize the other reasons why we should get rid of the test in terms of the other “costs” to both budgets and psyches.

A number of states are now moving their testing over onto computers in the next few years, and I’m already hearing that “it won’t be as easy to cheat” when that happens. Doubtful. The incentives to cheat have been made stronger, not reduced by the recent Race to the Top stupidity. 

Anyway, all five parts of this series are well worth the read.

So during vacation it apparently came out that a new Obama edu-initiative appeared, called by some “Race to the Top for Tots.” You guessed it…we’re now going to be giving money to states who can show that it’s preschoolers are test ready for elementary school. Cooper Zale has a great reflection on this fact that ties in nicely to the research that I cited in my post here yesterday. The absurdity continues:

But my fear is that in our instructional obsession (including a focus on a drill and test approach to ensure that instruction “sticks” at least until after the test), state funded and regulated preschool programs will be pushed in the direction of teaching to the test, which I believe would do a great disservice to our kids’ healthy development.  “Kindergarten readiness tests” are one thing if they are a low-stakes assessment for parents and other adults that work with the kid.  They are quite another thing when they become a high-stakes assessment by the state of which preschool programs will receive or not receive funding.

If as I fear it becomes a high-stakes situation, adult preschool staff are highly likely to increase their efforts to direct children’s play more, while the study I cited above says that children’s development is generally facilitated by directing their play less.  Even now, from my anecdotal experience, I’m concerned that many parents, childcare providers and teachers are way too directive when it comes to children’s skill development.

And it’s already happening. In this piece by Milwaukee kindergarten teacher Kelly McMahon in Rethinking Schools from a year ago (reg. req.), she recounts the number of tests that her 5-year-olds took in the 08-09 school year. 

• Milwaukee Public Schools’ 5-Year-Old Kindergarten Assessment (completed three times a year)
• On the Mark Reading Verification Assessment (completed three times a year)
• A monthly writing prompt focused on different strands of the Six Traits of Writing
• 28 assessments measuring key early reading and spelling skills
• Chapter pre- and post-tests for all nine math chapters completed
• Three additional assessments for each math chapter completed
• A monthly math prompt
• Four Classroom Assessments Based on Standards (CABS) per social studies chapter (20 total)
• Four CABS assessments per science chapter (20 total)
• Four CABS assessments per health chapter (20 total)

It’s hard to come to any other conclusion that we have simply lost our collective minds when it comes to learning, and the worst part of it is, there is no leadership at the highest levels that a) has an understanding of the really powerful negative effects of standardization, and b) is willing to educate us and move us collectively in a different direction. In that vacuum, we have Bill Gates and Jeb Bush and other non-educators who can’t see learning as anything but a bunch of numbers and data that can be sold to vendors and, now, parents.

But here is the bigger problem, I think. An engaged citizenry would have picked up this fight by now. I’m constantly amazed at how few people I talk to outside of my network really don’t have any sense of what this system is doing to their kids, and, more importantly, the kids in inner cities who don’t have nearly the advantages and opportunities they do. The fact we haven’t mustered much of a collective fight speaks volumes about the negative effects of a system that now is going to dumb down our youngest learners even more. 

Seems like I’m hitting a creativity theme here of late, but if you have 15 minutes to read this most excellent piece titled “The Educational Value of Creative Disobedience” by Andrea Kuszewski in Scientific American, you won’t regret it. It’s a research based look at why traditional teaching methods suck the creativity out of us and the hard work each of us needs to do to escape the effects as we grow into adulthood. The last paragraph captures the idea and the urgency:

What is supposed to be the most critical learning period for shaping children into the leaders of tomorrow has evolved over the years into a stifling of the creative instinct—wasting the age of imagination—which we then spend the rest of our lives trying to reconnect with. The time has never been more ready for systemic change than right now, and we’ve never had better tools to achieve this level of creative disobedience, to successfully prepare our children for the big challenges that lie ahead. It might be uncomfortable and take a bit of work, but our future depends on this radical change in order to survive.

Let me just add here the effects on creativity of the assessments we currently use are no less of a factor in this. They are what drive our teaching methods, and until we find a path to assessing something other than basic skills and content knowledge, we are assured of deepening the creativity crisis that is already here.

One more quick note of connection. I’m almost done with Eli Pariser’s great new book “The Filter Bubble,” and I hope to be blogging some thoughts on it shortly. But there is deep resonance between his thesis (watch his TED Talk to get the gist) that current search metrics are severely narrowing our access to the world of ideas and this quote from the Kuszewski article:

While learning from a teacher may help children get to a specific answer more quickly, it also makes them less likely to discover new information about a problem and to create a new and unexpected solution…it seems that by directly instructing children—giving them the answers to problems, then testing them on memory—we are inhibiting creative problem solving, to quite a significant degree.

In a few words, we are killing creativity on all fronts. And we’re going to have to change the way we teach (as well as, to a large extent, what we teach) if we’re to resuscitate it in our kids.

And, in the end, it’s not just about our kids. We need creative, “problem-finding” teachers in our classrooms as well. How do we get there?

From a lengthy .pdf titled “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants” by Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy, this snip jumped out at me as one that captures the challenges that our testing mindset is bringing us:

The new Common Core State Standards for mathematics and English and the work being done by the two assessment consortia will begin to address some of these issues, but, even when that work is done, the United States will still be at an enormous disadvantage relative to our competitors. We will have tests in these two subjects that are still not squarely based on clearly drawn curricula. The two consortia are betting heavily on the ability of computer-scored tests to measure the more complex skills and the creativity and capacity for innovation on which the future of our economy is likely to depend. No country that is currently out-performing the United States is doing that or is even considering doing that, because they are deeply skeptical that computer-scored tests or examinations can adequately measure the acquisition of the skills and knowledge they are most interested in. If the United States is right about this, we will wind up with a significant advantage over our competitors in the accuracy, timeliness and cost of scoring. If we are wrong, we will significantly hamper our capacity to measure the things we are most interested in measuring and will probably drive our curricula in directions we will ultimately regret.

What kills me is that we are even attempting to measure creativity and innovation by a “computer scored test” when we have this thing called a teacher already in the room and the potential of many other human assessors via the network who could do a much better job. Inherent in all of this is a deep distrust of the ability of humans to do the work of preparing our children for their worlds. On some level, I get that…we have a lot of work to do to bring the profession to a different, more effective place when it comes to developing the learning dispositions we want in both teachers and students. But surely, investing in that process, creating a new normal of teaching and learning will better serve our kids than attempting to standardize creativity. 

Right?

Our policy makers have this deep love of the test for lots of reasons: money, power, politics. But at it’s root, it’s because they are not educators. They can’t define and communicate what real learning is and looks like to their constituents, people who have all formed their own views of learning in test centric schools (for the most part.) They crave the easy answer. They can’t lead on this, but neither are they willing to let others, the real experts on learning, the educators in our schools, take the reins. That, ultimately, is what we will come to regret most of all.

“We moved so that my kids could go to the best school system in the state.”

That’s what the woman sitting next to us poolside said as our kids, fast becoming friends, splashed around in the water at a hotel somewhere in Wyoming during our recent vacation. We’d been talking about schools for about 20 minutes, and I couldn’t stop myself from asking “And how exactly did you find the best school system in the state?” Big state. California. I was curious.

Now before I give away the answer, one which won’t surprise anyone, let me just add that this was a very articulate, well-educated woman whose husband owns a successful software distribution company in Silicon Valley. Even though we’d just met, it was obvious that she was well-read, progressive in her thinking, and concerned about the system. So I winced just a bit when she said it.

“I just looked at all the test scores.”

I mean, I wasn’t surprised, but I guess I was hoping that she might have taken a different path, might have dug around for something a bit less obvious. Might have a different vision for what “best” means.

In a word…nope.

And I wonder if it’s even fair to expect that she might have taken a different route. I mean what was I hoping for?

“Well, first I wanted to make sure that the school had a solid grasp on inquiry-based learning, that the teachers were innovative and curious and letting their students take the lead, and that there was an obvious commitment to building a community of learners. And, of course, that there was a real understanding of how to use technology to prepare my kids for a digital world, to create things of value and to try to make the world a better place.”

Um…yeah. Right. Instead, she pressed the easy button; can I blame her?

But there is a kicker.

“So, how’s it worked out? Do you like the school?” I asked.

“It’s terrible,” she said. “My kids hate it. The teachers are just concerned about the test, and they’re all competitive as all get out. And the reason it gets the highest test scores is that just about every child there has parents who are pushing them and tutoring them and making sure they get what they need to ‘succeed.’”

Go figure.

Today is turning out to be Scott McLeod day here on my Tumblr page. It’s hard to argue with this:

We know, simply from projecting current trends forward, that in the future our learning will be even more digital, more mobile, and more multimedia than it is now. It will be more networked and more interconnected and often will occur online, lessening dependence on local humans. It frequently will be more informal and definitely will be more self-directed, individualized, and personalized. It will be more computer-based and more software-mediated and thus less reliant on live humans. It will be more open and more accessible and may occur in simulation or video game-like environments. And so on. We’re not going to retrench or go backward on any of these paths. We thus need school leaders who can begin envisioning the implications of these environmental characteristics for learning, teaching, and schooling. We need administrators who can design and operationalize our learning environments to reflect these new affordances. We need leaders who are brave enough to create the new paradigm instead of simply tweaking the status quo and who have the knowledge and ability to create schools that are relevant to the needs of students, families, and society…

None of us are exempt. We can’t firmly believe in ‘life-long learning’ and simultaneously not be clued in to the largest transformation in learning that ever has occurred in human history. Those two don’t co-exist. Being a ‘life-long learner’ is not ignoring what’s going on around us; we don’t get to claim the title of ‘effective educator’ or ‘excellent professor’ if we do this. We must change inertia into momentum. That’s what we owe our children and grandchildren.

Read the full essay to get what I think is a pretty compelling case for change. Then forward it to your administrators, school board members, and community leaders. Ask them what they think.

(Source: ucea.org)

After 10 years of blogging, I’ve decided to move my efforts away from Weblogg-ed over to here, my new site on Tumblr. You can read some of my reasoning here, but safe to say more than anything else, I just felt like I needed a change, that the world has changed, and that what I want to do online has changed as well. I will forever be grateful to the many readers and commentors who have stopped by my blog over the last few years as they have pushed my thinking and learning immeasurably. I really hope that continues here as well.

This is a bit of new adventure, an experiment in blogging, in community, in portfolio-making and a whole bunch more. I’m still working out the kinks in my process here, but I hope to be sharing out on a regular basis not only the long form writing that my old blog was built upon but also shorter snips with more concise comment, that space between my blog and my Twitter account. Both have left me frustrated of late, so I’m hoping this will closer to that sweet spot that I’m looking for. 

Please feel free to comment and link and expand the conversation around change in schools and the impact that technologies are having on learning. It’s a most interesting time to be in education, much to figure out, much to learn. Hopefully we can do much of that together.

Thanks for reading.