ideas

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware. - Martin Buber

Last week, Jane asked me a couple very good questions about methods and quantifying knowledge. I’ve thought about it a bit, and have a few ideas. First I’d like to talk a little bit about “showing how narrow a range of learning is actually captured in tests.” I was fortunate to finally receive a book by Diane Ravitch last week, titled The Death and Life of the Great American School System. I’d been on the library’s waiting list quite a while for that one! I think that the exposure her book has gotten coupled with the fact that she’s a powerful figure in the world of education whose views about "accountability" have undergone a dramatic reversal will do wonders to shed light on the narrow range of learning captured in tests. The fact that her book seems to have wide appeal - I was three hundred and something on the library’s waiting list when I signed up - will help many outside of academia realize that we chose poorly when we decided to prescribe methods that focused narrowly on teaching to tests - and only to two tests, reading and mathematics - at the exclusion of everything else, and prescribed standardized testing as a measure of schools’ success or failure.

Treating education as if it were a business, placing undue emphasis on top-down management of schools, choice, and accountability, has not worked. In fact, in Texas, classroom methods devolved into a curricula that simply taught to the test, teaching skills such as strategies to use when answering multiple choice questions. This raised test scores, and Texas was seen as an impressive success of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). However, students trapped in this accountability-centered abyss, when given a text to review, were incapable of writing “a thoughtful response to a question that asked them to present evidence from what they read.” (Ravitch, D., 2010, p. 108) Drilling for and succeeding on the tests became the overriding educational goal of schools in Texas - and all over the United States similar patterns emerged. Students in an elementary school in Annapolis performed impressively on the state assessments - teachers assiduously practiced skills such as how to answer questions likely to appear on the state test. This achievement was at the expense of general knowledge, though, and students “lacked the vocabulary and general knowledge to succeed in high school.” (Ravitch, 2010, p. 109) As Ravitch describes them, they were trained, not educated. If public opinion hasn’t swayed against this undue emphasis on testing by 2014 - when 100% proficiency is mandated and we will definitely have not achieved 100% proficiency unless standards are lowered - at that time minds should certainly start changing, in my opinion.

If we hope to achieve success in turning American public education away from "assessment," we’ll have to have thought out and considered alternatives. The Buber quote I opened with is apropos of how I feel we should approach education. Knowledge is the disclosure of the previously undisclosed and we can't imagine all we might discover. I was asked in last week’s blog post, “[H]ow is it that teachers can articulate a richer understanding of what students like [Kelyn] *are* learning and why those things are important for the children and for the world that they'll eventually lead?" I think there are many different ways to quantify what our kids are learning (I’ll add that I think it’s unlikely that standardized tests are quantifying what kids are learning, even though that’s what they purport to do). Tests could be structured so that critical analysis of what one has learned is evaluated - short answer and essay tests immediately come to mind, but other “tests” come to mind, perhaps a multimedia presentation, or a skit, or even a model. Our recent readings in Jean Eisele’s class that talk about multi-ability classrooms suggest another possible alternative. Group learning could be structured around individual strengths, and assessments could be made based on kids’ ability to help their fellows grasp the concepts related to their “expertise.” Multicultural classrooms could have children teaching their peers about their cultural individuality, such as their cuisine or their traditions. As Oakes & Lipton point out, “complex, realistic, multidimensional assignments and projects” enable children to “discover and combine their particular strengths with areas where they are not strong or lack experience.” (2007, p. 173) At any rate, any and all methods of assessing knowledge should be particular to what’s being learned and as much as is practicable, to the individual learner. This could mean offering the learner the opportunity to demonstrate what he’s learned in the venue/medium he’s most confident in.

The second half of the above question - why is this knowledge important - is addressed, I believe, in last week’s Dewey reading for Jean Eisele’s class. Before I discuss that, however, I’d like to proclaim my belief that NCLB-style education hasn’t demonstrated to our kids why the knowledge we’re handing out is important. Our system of so-called accountability has stripped knowledge of its context and what we’re producing is adults who can’t relate what they’ve learned to real world situations. We’ve seen examples of this throughout our readings, such as in a story of graduates who cannot see the direct connection between a learned mathematical principle and its real world application. We’ve created a strong dichotomy between knowledge, which is treated as esoteric, and application, which is often seen as of secondary importance. This leads us back to Dewey’s premise - still valid after over 100 years - that we learn what we do. How do we make knowledge important to our kids? Contextualize it to their experience. As Dewey stated in My Pedagogic Creed: “If we eliminate the social factor from the child we are left with only the abstraction.” (1897) he further states that “school must represent life - life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the playground.” (1897)

If we give our kids an education grounded in their reality, we’ve taken the first big step in producing intelligent adults able to make real life connections and with the ability to make moral and ethical choices. Where does this ability come from? When we teach to our context, we are encouraging our kids to develop critical thinking skills as they apply their knowledge to and make informed judgments about our larger world. We’ve imbued education with relatability - which shows cause and effect, incorporates a diversity of experience, and illuminates connections between individual and knowledge.

Dewey, J. (1897 January). “My Pedagogic Creed.” School Journal vol. 54, 77-80
Oakes, J. and M. Lipton (2007). Teaching to Change the World. Boston: McGraw Hill.
Ravith, D. (2010). The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education. New York. N.Y.: Basic Books