Here’s why testing is irrelevant, and does not work, in
American Public Schools…
Just before
the American Revolution there was this “Tea Party.” When the current manifestation of the
American Tea Party reared its ugly head in 2010, I frequently thought that the
leaders of this movement were using the Revolutionary event out of context. I have changed my mind. The contemporary Tea Party is exactly what
the Revolution was about. “We don’t want
to pay for anything that you give us because it’s all about me.”
The ongoing
battle over testing in America, and the misuse of results to illustrate our
intellectual fall world wide, has focused on testing as a magic bullet to
improve our teaching force. However,
many proponents of testing are beginning to discover that tests are ill suited
for this purpose. Some have discovered
that the instruments are in many cases poorly made, but more have discovered
that these tests are an inappropriate measure of what children in the U.S. can
actually do. More importantly, tests are
typically about norms and Americans are about the individual.
The Tea
Party of the 18th century represents an excellent manifestation of
American culture. The libertarian vein,
that actually began with the Puritans, has constantly reinforced this idea of
individual manifestation that has lead us to catastrophe and triumph. Each individual child in the United States
has developed a social-emotional attachment to a selfish “pursuit of happiness.” In an educational context, students act in
their perceived self-interest. I
frequently tell folks that schools are designed by those who value school
performance; therefore, about 1/3 of the U.S. student population values school as
indicated by the their success with standardized tests and grades. In other words, many, if not most, students
in American schools could not care less about test results.
I often
find it puzzling when pundits refer to random international testing data as
evidence of our instructional crisis.
Anyone who has spent any time in an instructional setting can tell you
that standardized tests mean very little to most students. Too often, the U.S. student simply wants to
get the test and irrelevant curricula done to move on to more important
things. As Ron Berger of Expeditionary
Learning puts it, ”The most important assessment is that which is going on in
the students head.” The problem with
tests based on standards developed by educators is that, too often, they don’t
match the individual student’s priorities. Unlike many of the developed countries that
out perform our students on standardized measures, American students are about
me, not us.
The concept
of school, along with the typical physical and intellectual design of an
academic setting, sets limits on opportunity for American students. John Dewey attempted to address this through
the Progressive Movement, but the paternal nature of a systemic public education
hierarchy kept the Open School concept from taking hold. The good news is that those of us in
education are now seeing students as individual learners, but the autocratic
habits of public school culture continue to act based on normative results
rather than individual need. The Common Core represents the ongoing
conflict between individual learning and systemic solutions. The misapplication of Common Core
philosophical premise with normative testing models is a sign that the systemic
is, once again, overwhelming the needs of the individual learner. Normative tests will never get us to better
outcomes in the United States, because the American student is wired to see
self first. In some ways, the American Revolution,
along with the Enlightenment, represented the true agenda of our fore fathers
and mothers: Individual justification for action. I see this daily in students who dismiss tests
as irrelevant to their existence.
Gaining a balance between systemic and individual interest will require
a school environmental revolution that focuses on meaningful interaction and
experience; not bubbles on a page.
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