This diary (excerpts borrowed from fellow education activist Peter Henry, with his permission) offers both a plea for help--Please Recommend--and information that can and should be promulgated so that more Americans understand just where we are at this historical moment. Peter Henry is author of a recently award winning article, "The Case Against Standardized Testing", which I cited in a previous post.
http://www.mcte.org/journal/mej07/3Henry.pdfWith America in high dudgeon over looming primaries, some issues get pushed to the rear, like education. Yet few, if any issues, are more important to the survival and strengthening of democracy than how we value and educate our nation's children.
NCLB has hit stalemate, leaving thousands of schools under threat of State takeover, tens of thousands of teachers in limbo, and millions of young students (the non-drop outs) stuck in dreary test-prep factories right out of a 19th century Dickens novel.
But, this diary plumbs issues beyond the morass that Bush, with bipartisan help, created with his sole domestic "success story"--NCLB.
Going on three decades, America's political elites have bought into a simple, seductive meme about what education means and how it can be measured. It was sold by business interests intent on boosting America's "competitiveness"--faced with eroding profits from foreign competition.
Together, they created a dynamic right out of the privatizer's handbook: denigrate the quality of a public service, blame a convenient scapegoat, and thereby justify unprecedented changes to the way government serves citizens, especially the poor and people of color.
The core of this strategy has been to use standardized testing as a means of "measuring" student achievement. It's key because it offers a quasi-scientific patina to calls for "accountability." Numbers can be created or twisted to show just how awful America's educational system has become, particularly in urban and poor rural districts. Never mind that the reality behind these numbers is far more complex, entangled in socio-economics and laden with uncertainty.
The key has always been to up the ante on testing.
Not just once in awhile, not just to aid instruction, not just to identify strengths and weakness, not just to assess program efficacy--but for everything, from teacher pay, to ranking schools, to awarding scholarships, to deciding which students graduate and which do not.
We have truly sold our soul to the standardized testing devil, so much that it's all some schools and many students have time for during a school day.
Evidence abounds that America is completely off its rocker in terms of how it views public education: whether it is the gestalt of what real learning is for an individual, the efficacy and rationale for what teaching is, or how we mistake appearances, in the form of numbers, for the reality of creating well-educated and fully engaged citizens.
They also reveal that, far from being a reliable and valid measure of student learning, standardized tests are, in fact, the equivalent of Enron's stock certificates, sold as a panacea to the equivalent of Katrina victims stranded in a flood of inequality on America's rooftops, produced by the equivalent of America's subprime pushers--not because they are effective and accomplish what they are meant to, but because they create lucrative profits while placing an expanding burden around the necks of people trying to stay afloat in America's "survival of the fittest" milieu.
Even by the very terms of standardization, validity, reliability, transparency, relevance, many psychometricians and educational academics agree that the current overuse and misuse of standardized testing is next to useless at measuring or producing improved learning outcomes, or fostering innovative instructional practice.
If nothing else, if you go blankly through this day and do nothing more than reduce available oxygen on the planet, remember this quote:
The vast majority of standardized tests, upon which we have based the future of America's human capital, feature poor validity, low reliability, zero transparency and absolutely no relevance or meaning for young people saddled with having to take them. Nor are they predictive, definitive or even useful in terms of calibrating instructional practice.
Our educational establishment has spent little time, money or energy actually improving teaching, educational capacity or re-organizing schools' institutional culture. How exactly does this equate to anything other than "America's great leap backwards" in educational history?
Please take note of a study just produced by ETS, "The Family: America's Smallest School". That's right, the Educational Testing Service. You may think that with their production of 50 million standardized tests every year, they might not be a great source of unbiased information about testing and its inherent limitations. The study confirms (yet again) the most consistent finding in the realm of educational research, the strong link between poverty, societal ills, and the academic achievement of poor and disadvantaged children.
The ETS study shows, as many professional educators have always maintained, that it is not where a student "ends up" on a standardized test that identifies the effectiveness of their school education---not to mention the likelihood of their success---it's where they "started out" in terms of their level of affluence.
The E.T.S. researchers took four variables that are beyond the control of schools: The percentage of children living with one parent; the percentage of eighth graders absent from school at least three times a month; the percentage of children 5 or younger whose parents read to them daily, and the percentage of eighth graders who watch five or more hours of TV a day. Using just those four variables, the researchers were able to predict each state’s results on the federal eighth-grade reading test with impressive accuracy.
Together, these four factors account for about two-thirds of the large differences among states," the report said. In other words, the states that had the lowest test scores tended to be those that had the highest percentages of children from single-parent families, eighth graders watching lots of TV and eighth graders absent a lot, and the lowest percentages of young children being read to regularly, regardless of what was going on in their schools.
Which gets to the heart of the report: by the time these children start school at age 5, they are far behind, and tend to stay behind all through high school. There is no evidence that the gap is being closed.
NYTimes
In other words, as a country we have set school finish lines out there in terms of graduation and meeting "standards". But, as test results' correlations show over and over, some students begin well over half way to the finish line, exceptionally well-prepared to jog in to college acceptance, while other students, without shoes, or training, or breakfast, or encouragement, hear a starter's pistol somewhere in the fog and are crabbed at and told to run, hurry and climb over each other---that learning means following orders and directions and doing very unpleasant things, and that they better get to the finish line or be labeled a failure for life. Run, dammit. And don't even pause to think about why.
Is it any wonder that dropout rates for students of color approach 50%? Without crucial relationships, without personal connection or meaning for what they study, without decent facilities, high quality staff or enlightened leadership, without safe neighborhoods or communities around their school, and (often) without a coherent family structure or system to reinforce their efforts, many students opt for other--less savory--options.
Consider the inequities: we have a growing disparity between rich and poor. The United States, the richest nation in the world, has the highest rate of childhood poverty among all the wealthy nations. We know how that impacts students' ability to learn in multiple ways. We know there are certain communities where these needs and deficits completely overwhelm the system's ability to respond effectively. Yet, instead of addressing this at a policy level, we systematically defund schools with large percentages of poor and minority students and tell them they have failed based on test scores.
And, remember: the learning process is so distorted and limited by the necessity of achieving high test scores that school itself has become a form of misery for both students and staff alike.
Why would we be doing this?
Partly it could be genuine fear. Fear of the younger generation goes way back to antiquity. Here is Socrates himself:
Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in the place of exercise, they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company gobble up their food and tyrranize teachers.
Partly it could be a vestige of a racist need to "control" people of color: increasingly, immigrants and people of color are becoming a majority in our inner-city schools.
Partly it could be a growing faith in rationalizing public funding around measurable outcomes, much like we see in trying to identify effective practices in health care.
But, most likely, it is partly each of these and a whole lot of this: a systematic campaign by powerful corporate and political elites to move public education onto a new footing: private school competition. It means using the media to systematically plant the meme that schools are not "measuring up" based on standardized test scores.
Why would they do this?
One, because there are hundreds of billions of dollars spent every year on K-12 education across the United States. There's good money to be made at a time when there are not a lot of economic frontiers opening up for investment capital.
Two, there are true believers who genuinely think that society uniformly gets better results when individual consumers make choices in a marketplace filled with competition--the subprime debacle, rising income inequality, Enron and global climate change notwithstanding. This is classic neo-liberalism (sic).
Three, some business leaders and conservative politicians see in public education, the sole viable threat to their power and control over America's market and public opinion. In other words, young people taught to think and ask important questions are viewed as a threat to the profits and hegemony that certain companies currently enjoy, and happily exploit.
That may sound extreme, even a bit paranoid--as if there is a "vast right wing conspiracy" out to get public education. But, it doesn't have to be a conspiracy. It can simply be a campaign which employs a coherent strategy and has been unfolding over a series of decades. After all, if elements in our society have already shown levels of desperation great enough to invade a country which posed no legitimate threat to our security, why would they blanch at taking out public education?
What are school report cards meant to achieve? Is it really to inform parents about their choice as consumers of education? (As if parents with money have no idea where to educate their children.) Or, is it to identify a few laggards, schools whose scores don't measure up because of poverty and reality---then push them over the cliff of restructuring or privatization?
Has this ever been the purpose of report cards--to compare in order to identify losers and then penalize them?
But that's exactly what standardized testing is about. In and of themselves, an occasional standard exam is just an exercise that provides feedback for teachers or parents or schools about some limited aspect of a child's ability spectrum (or at least for the students who actually tried on that particular instrument). But, in no way, have they ever, or should they ever, become the very basis and rationale for education itself.
The only worthy goal of education is excellence: to allow every learner to find and develop their full potential in whatever field or area of learning they feel most challenged and fulfilled.
And, right now, the only children accorded that privilege attend high quality private and public institutions in which a massive social, economic and structural advantage awaits them. For the rest, public education has been reduced to a numbers chase, in which existing inequities are frozen in place by a need to pursue a kind of learning that limits them to minimum competency exams. Just what jobs will be there for high school graduates, able or unable to master the zen of filling in test bubbles?
People, No Child Left Behind is a product of two decades of moving American education more and more toward standardization and dumbed-down student outcomes, using the sturdy accomplices of "measurable accountability", "high stakes testing" and "high standards." But what would we expect from an administration that lauds the "blue skies initiative" for coal plants, "healthy forests" logging policy and "enhanced interrogation" torture techniques?
It is high time that the memes around education, particularly our misguided faith in standardized test numbers, be revealed for what they are: a salacious but coordinated attempt to undermine American public education, replacing it with something unknown, untried and unplanned---but much more profitable for wealthy and well-connected corporations.
Whatever happens next in federal education policy, the core issue is whether we continue to outsource and empower corporate test providers, or whether we return to providing quality education---which means people, training and programming---capable of addressing actual issues facing each of our many school communities.
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