Good Op. Ed. from Iowa

[Bob Schaeffer <bobschaeffer@earthlink.net>]

HOW TO IMPROVE EDUCATION? RESIST STRAITJACKET OF STANDARDS; MAKE EFFORTS 
LEARNER-CENTERED
Des Moines Register Op. Ed. -- April 21, 2008
by Dave O'Connor and Alan Young

The Register's April 9 editorial, "Help Iowa Aim High: Set Rigorous 
Standards," used the word "rigorous" five times in an 11-paragraph 
piece. Princeton University's Word Net defines rigorous as "rigidly 
accurate; allowing no deviation from a standard."

The same online dictionary defines "rigid" as "inflexible: incapable of 
adapting or changing to meet circumstances." Are rigidity, inflexibility 
and an inability to adapt to changing circumstances really the 
characteristics the Register believes Iowa should be looking to instill 
in its 21st century citizens?

As Register editors call for "more rigorous state content standards and 
mandatory core curriculum," they should be honest with Iowans. What they 
are really calling for is an expensive, bureaucratic system of 
state-controlled content enforced through a testing regime. New 
standardized state assessments to replace the ITBS/ITED will then be 
implemented at an initial cost of up to $125 million to determine how 
successful our students become at recognizing right answers on multiple 
choice tests.

External nonprofit education organizations will come onto the state 
payroll to review our new standards and assessment to ensure that they 
are rigorous enough. An additional array of end-of-course assessments 
and practice tests will then appear to help make sure our students are 
ready for the state test.

Before you know it, millions of our limited tax dollars that could have 
been spent on class-size reduction, technology, professional development 
and other proven initiatives that directly impact student learning will 
instead have gone into the creation of a testing bureaucracy. This 
approach will drown district efforts to develop more important thinking 
and communication capacities Iowa students need to thrive in a 
democratic society or compete in the global marketplace.

As Professor Linda Darling Hammond of Stanford University has noted, 
"...Almost nothing we do in the world of work requires recognizing one 
of several pre-selected responses to questions about a single fact or 
piece of information. Most jobs in today's knowledge-based economy 
require that we find, assemble and analyze information, write and speak 
clearly and persuasively; and work with others to solve messy problems 
that don't have predetermined answers."

Others have argued that focusing on standardized testing and centralized 
curriculum squelches creativity and innovation, "...the very things that 
our competitors in Asia are trying to copy in their own educational 
reforms."

When state-controlled curriculum is implemented to support 
state-mandated standards, the focus is on what is most easily tested, 
not what is most valuable to learn. Education evolves into a race to 
cover a pre-determined list of facts in time for students to regurgitate 
them on cheap-to-grade bubble tests. Pennsylvania, for example, has one 
seventh-grade science and technology class with 178 state-mandated 
objectives that teachers must teach. Real, inquiry-based learning - 
where students play a role in choosing what to explore and teachers can 
develop curriculum that is responsive to student interests and 
real-world events - takes a back seat to test preparation.

There is scant evidence to prove that this approach is effective. 
Professor Gerald Bracey of the Center for Education Research, Analysis 
and Innovation found "absolutely no correlation" between states with 
rigorous standards and improved standardized test scores. And the 
testing companies themselves, after 60-plus years, still provide 
virtually no evidence that standardized tests improve student learning.

The Register's editorial criticized Iowa's current standards as "so 
broad they are almost meaningless." Iowa's current standards, when 
combined with a voluntary model core curriculum, provide teachers and 
districts with both the direction and the flexibility they need to teach 
students what they need to know to be active and engaged members of our 
democracy. At the same time, they allow students to delve into the messy 
world of critical thinking that rigidly accurate and inflexible 
standards documents ignore.

There are many ways we can and must improve education in Iowa. But they 
should be learner-centered, not subject-centered, and they should be 
made by those closest to the children. Moving curricular decision-making 
even farther away from the classroom and creating a system of mandatory 
compliance will not yield learning communities of excellence.

Mandating top-down, simplistic rigor as reform may satisfy some 
legislators and editorial writers that they have "done something," but 
in reality it will subvert ongoing district efforts to create even 
better, higher-quality, learner-centered curricula and assessments.

Our children deserve better than this kind of failed "standard" 
educational reform.

  DAVE O'CONNOR is a teacher at Merrill Middle School and ALAN YOUNG is 
a teacher and president of the Des Moines Education Association.

   
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080421/OPINION01/804210304/-1/BUSINESS04