I’ve been watching reruns of the television show House recently. Patients come into
Princeton-Plainsboro hospital in varying degrees of ill health. Dr. House
prescribes a bunch of tests and treats the patients based on those tests. The
patients get worse. More tests, more treatment, more declining patients. This
goes on until the last 15 minutes when Dr. House—usually without the benefit of
more tests—finally figures out what is really wrong, gives the patients a pill
or a shot and voilà! Health restored.
This strikes me as a good metaphor for educational reform. The “patient” has been in poor
health—depending on who’s doing the diagnosing—for 10 years, 30 years, or since
the particular diagnostician making the claim graduated. Interesting side note:
cuneiform tablets from around 3000 BCE have been found in which the writer
complains about students’ lack of skills.
Like Doctor House, our educational reformers prescribe a
battery of tests, but unlike Doctor House, these tests aren’t supposed to
provide information leading to the cure, they’re supposed to be the cure. Strangely, the patient gets
sicker. Diagnosis: More testing. The patient declines further, so even more
tests are called for.
Well, since this is my analogy I get to play the role of Dr.
House and tell you that there is no need for further testing—especially since it seems to be
making the patient worse. I know what the disease is, or at least a major
component of a multi-faceted, multi-level disease. It’s poverty, and much as
I’d like to take credit for that diagnosis, as a profession we’ve known about
this disease and its effects on the educational achievement of students for a
long time. I did a brief, informal review of the literature on poverty and
educational achievement and found research going back into the 70’s that indicated
the longer children live in poverty,
the lower their educational achievement.
Recently, there was an article
that appeared in the Post Tribune
about the effects of poverty on school achievement which, for the purposes of my
analogy can serve as a description of symptoms for this national disease. Patients suffering from this malady often share
the following history:
In a recent report by Cornell University, “The Role of Planning Skills
in the Income-Achievement Gap,” researchers used longitudinal data from the
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development’s Study of Early Child
Care and Youth Development to establish a significant link between early
childhood poverty and weak math and reading achievement in the primary grades,
regardless of IQ.
Previous research has shown that income-related gaps in academic
achievement start as early as kindergarten and continue through high school.
Those gaps are amplified by low levels of intellectual stimulation and few
healthy relationships with adults in the home. But this is the first time the
income-achievement gap has been explained with the behavioral measurement of
ability to plan efficiently, from such a young age.
Now, I think that even though Dr. House is a medical doctor
and not an educational specialist even he could see that kids who suffer from “low
levels of intellectual stimulation and few healthy relationships with adults in
the home” don’t need more tests to learn better, nor are
you going to improve the skills of students who come from an environment “which includes constant high levels of
background noise, the overvaluation of entertainment as a respite from the
exertions of survival, a strong belief in destiny or fate because choices are
in low supply, and polarized thinking in which options are hardly ever examined
(again, because so few tend to be available)” by subjecting them to high stakes exams, wouldn’t
you agree Arne
Duncan, Secretary of Education and head diagnostician for America’s schools?
Today is a great day! I have looked forward to
this day for a long time--and so have America's teachers, parents, students,
and school leaders. Today is the day that marks the beginning of the
development of a new and much-improved generation of assessments for America's
schoolchildren. Today marks the start of Assessments 2.0.
Oh. Well, uh…guess the only people
getting healthy around here are the ones that own test making companies.
