The Past Is Prologue...To Failure

Here’s something from the Who Could Have Predicted Department:

“Children are getting the message at a very young age that if you pick the right choice between several options you can be successful. That’s not the way to learn, especially creatively. That’s not experimenting or exploring or creating. We’re telling kids that that life is a series of hoops and that they need to start jumping through them very early.”

Gee, it’s almost like if you ramp up the pressure on schools to make their students perform on tests; if you threaten to withdraw funding from schools if their students don’t do well on tests; if you tell teachers and administrators their careers ride on how well their students do on tests, you get schools that make tests the most important thing they do.

This is just an example of something that’s going on all over the country: eviscerating the curriculum to make more room for test prep.

Optimists in the crowd will probably say if you’re going to over emphasize something math and reading are good choices, but I would argue that’s just whistling past the graveyard.

See, students aren’t being taught more math to deepen their understanding of mathematical concepts. They aren’t having reading emphasized to increase their comprehension skills, or to develop an appreciation for reading. They are being prepared for tests, standardized tests that value a certain kind of thought: shallow. As the quote indicates, the kind of thinking that focuses on the “correct” answer rather than using reason, or critical thinking skills to develop deep understanding, or what we in the field like to refer to as “learning.” The National Assessment of Educational Progress (the Nation’s Report Card people) figured that out years ago, back when the nation was “at risk”:

As the National Assessment of Educational Progress found: Only 5 to 10 percent of (high school) students can move beyond initial readings of a test; most seem genuinely puzzled at requests to explain or defend their points of view. The NAEP assessors explained that current methods of teaching and testing reading require short responses and lower level cognitive thinking, resulting in an emphasis on shallow and superficial opinions at the expense of reasoned and disciplined thought..., (thus) it is not surprising that students fail to develop more comprehensive thinking and analytic skills (NAEP, 1981). (qtd in Darling Hammond 1993. 77:18)

What this means essentially is that students mentioned in the article, and to a lesser degree students all over the country aren’t being educated as much as they’re being trained. Trained to perform on the test.

This is a “reform” technique that has more in common with 19^th century definitions of literacy than those of the 21^st. At the beginning of World War I the mark of basic literacy was the ability to sign your own name. By the start of the Second World War, the military needed soldiers who could read and understand sophisticated manuals in order to be able to operate and maintain more complex weapons systems, and thus the measure of basic literacy became connected to reading level.

When Sputnik set off the space race the call went out to schools to produce students who could solve complex technical and scientific problems and the definition of a literate person took another leap. Today the Internet brings the world to our fingertips and with it a new phrase has entered the lexicon: Information overload. Experts at the Cisco company estimate that shortly there will be 667 exabytes annually flowing around the Internet. An exabyte is one billion billion bytes. Every minute 35 hours of video is uploaded to the web. Every minute 460 new users come on to the Internet and every day almost 58,000 new websites go active.

Yet, into this maelstrom of information, this chaos of competing, conflicting and contradictory ideas, we are sending students whose school experience has more in common with an age when education was more about memorizing and reciting Bible verses than surviving the digital deluge.

Art and Music are usually the first victims of a test prep driven curriculum, but by removing them we may be giving up far more than we get. A study in the Boston area found that art classes develop:

[V]isual-spatial abilities, reflection, self-criticism, and the willingness to experiment and learn from mistakes. All are important to numerous careers, but are widely ignored by today's standardized tests.

And music, it turns out, may be even more valuable, even to test prep driven schools because studies show:

[M]usic training - specifically piano instruction - can dramatically enhance children’s spatial-temporal reasoning skills, the skills crucial for greater success in subjects like math and science.

It seems all our “reforms” have moved us back to where schools were when John Dewey wrote:

Education means the creation of a discerning mind, a mind that prefers not to dupe itself, or to be the dupe of others…[It means] the habit of suspended judgment, of skepticism, of desire for evidence, of appeal to observation rather than sentiment, discussion rather than bias, inquiry rather than conventionalized idealizations. (Education As Politics, 334)

Would someone please direct me to the section of the Common Core Standards that covers that—especially that part about inquiry rather than conventionalized idealizations.