Fwd: [ARN-state] Kohn: Case against 'tougher standards'

[Susan Harman <susanharman@igc.org>]

If you dont know what to say to congresspeople, try this.

Susan

  From RESIST - www.resistinc.org

  Case Against "Tougher Standards"

  One-Size-Fits-All Doesn't Make the Grade

  by Alfie Kohn
People who talk about educational "standards" use the term in different ways.
Sometimes they're referring to guidelines for teaching, the implication being
that we should change the nature of instruction—a horizontal shift, if you will.
In the case of the standards drafted by the National Council of Teachers of
Mathematics in 1989, for example, the idea was to shift away from isolated facts
and memorized procedures and toward conceptual understanding and problem solving.

  By contrast, when you hear someone say that we need to "raise standards,"
  that represents a vertical shift, a claim that students ought to know more,
  do more, perform better. This can get confusing because discussions about
  standards sometimes are limited to only one of these meanings, sometimes
  flip-flop between them, and sometimes involve an implicit appeal to one in
  order to press for the other.

  The idea of vertical movement seems hard to argue with, at least in the
  abstract. Don't we want schools to be of high quality, and students to be
  able to do many things well? Of course. But the current demand for Tougher
  Standards carries with it a bundle of assumptions about the proper role of
  schools, the nature and causes of failure, and the way students learn. That's
  why a number of people (mostly educators) have come to view with growing
  alarm what is now the dominant model of school reform.

  People from parents to Presidents have begun to sound like cranky,
  ill-informed radio talk-show hosts, with the result that almost anything can
  be done to students and to schools, no matter how ill-considered, as long as
  it is done in the name of "raising standards" or "accountability." One is
  reminded of how a number of politicians, faced with the perception of high
  crime rates, resort to a get-tough, lock-'em-up, law-and-order mentality.
  This response plays well with the public but is based on an exaggeration of
  the problem, a misanalysis of its causes, and a simplistic prescription that
  frequently ends up doing more harm than good.

  So too with demanding Tougher Standards in education. Back in 1959, public
  education critic John Holt wrote that the main effect "of the drive for
  so-called higher standards in schools is that the children are too busy to
  think." Today, it is almost impossible to distinguish Democrats from
  Republicans on this set of issues—only those with some understanding of how
  children learn from those who haven't a clue.

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  The disagreement that plays itself out in boards of education and state
  legislatures is pretty much limited to a clash between, on one side, the
  champions of Tougher Standards (a constituency that includes virtually all
  corporate groups, the President and the Governors, the leadership of the
  American Federation of Teachers, and most reporters who write about
  education); and, on the other side, those on the extreme right wing whose
  suspicion of anything involving the federal government leads them to oppose
  national standards or testing. (They, too, tend to endorse the idea of
  Tougher Standards, but insist on local control.) That's pretty much the
  extent of the public debate on the subject. Left out almost entirely is the
  point of view of the students themselves, and the impact of standards on
  their learning.

  The result is that, from California to New York, from Michigan to Texas, from
  Virginia to Colorado, the kind of teaching that helps students understand
  ideas from the inside out—and that sustains their interest in
  understanding—is under siege. One story can stand in for thousands: Not long
  ago, a widely respected middle-school teacher in Wisconsin, famous for
  helping students design their own innovative learning projects, stood up at a
  community meeting and announced that he "used to be" a good teacher. The
  auditorium fell silent at his use of the past tense. These days, he
  explained, he just handed out textbooks and quizzed his students on what they
  had memorized. The reason was very simple. He and his colleagues were
  increasingly being held accountable for raising test scores. The kind of
  wide-ranging and enthusiastic exploration of ideas that once characterized
  his classroom could no longer survive when the emphasis was on preparing
  students to take a standardized examination.

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  The purveyors of Tougher Standards had won, and therefore the students had
  lost.

  Five Fatal Flaws of Tougher Standards

  The Tougher Standards movement is fatally flawed in five separate ways.

  1. It gets motivation wrong. Most talk of standards assumes that students
  ought to be thinking constantly about improving their performance. This
  single-minded concern with results turns out to be remarkably simplistic. The
  assumption that achievement is all that counts overlooks a substantial body
  of psychological research suggesting that a focus on how well one is doing is
  very different from a focus on what one is doing. Moreover, a preoccupation
  with performance often undermines interest in learning, quality of learning,
  and a desire to be challenged.

  2. It gets pedagogy wrong. The Tougher Standards contingent is big on
  back-to-basics, and, more generally, the sort of instruction that treats kids
  as though they were inert objects, that prepares a concoction called "basic
  skills" or "core knowledge" and then tries to pour it down their throats.
  State standards documents, in particular, typically contain long lists of
  specific facts and skills that all students in a given grade level are
  expected to master. This is a model that might be described as outdated were
  it not for the fact that, frankly, there never was a time when it worked all
  that well. Modern cognitive science just explains more systematically why it
  has always come up short.

  3. It gets evaluation wrong. In practice, "excellence," "higher standards,"
  and "raising the bar" all refer to scores on standardized tests, many of them
  multiple-choice, norm-referenced, and otherwise flawed. Indeed, much of the
  discussion about education today is arrested at the level of "Test scores are
  low; make them go up." All the limits of, and problems with, such testing
  amount to a serious indictment of the version of school reform that relies on
  these tests.

  4. It gets school reform wrong. Proponents of Tougher Standards have a
  proclivity for trying to coerce improvement by specifying exactly what must
  be taught and learned—that is, by mandating a particular kind of education.
  There is good reason to doubt that the way one changes schooling is simply by
  demanding that teachers and students do things differently. "Accountability"
  usually turns out to be a code for tighter control over what happens in
  classrooms by people who are not in classrooms—and it has approximately the
  same effect on learning that a noose has on breathing.

  5. It gets improvement wrong. Weaving its way through all these ideas is an
  implicit assumption about "rigor" and "challenge"—namely, that harder is
  always better. The reductive (and really rather silly) idea that tests,
  texts, and teachers can all be judged on the single criterion of difficulty
  level lurks behind complaints about "dumbing down" education and strident
  calls to "raise the bar." Its first cousin is the idea that if something
  isn't working very well—say, requiring students to do homework of dubious
  value—then insisting on more of the same will surely solve the problem. As
  Harvey Daniels (a nationally recognized author and education professor) puts
  it, the dominant philosophy of fixing schools today consists of saying, in
  effect, that "what we're doing is OK, we just need to do it harder, longer,
  stronger, louder, meaner, and we'll have a better country."

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  Any one of these five problems would be enough to raise serious questions
  about the call for Tougher Standards. Together, they suggest a threat of such
  dimensions that the only reasonable question for conscientious educators and
  parents is how we can most effectively change directions.

  A Word about NCLB

  The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) places an overwhelming emphasis on
  standardized testing as a route to success in school. However, it is also
  designed to humiliate and hurt the schools that, according to its own warped
  standards, most need help. Families at those schools are given a green light
  to abandon them— and, specifically, to transfer to other schools. This, it
  quickly becomes clear, is an excellent way to sandbag the "successful"
  schools, too.

  Those concerned about education must quit confining their complaints about
  NCLB to the peripheral problems of implementation or funding. Too many people
  give the impression that there would be nothing to object to if only their
  own school had been certified as making adequate progress, or if only
  Washington were more generous in paying for this assault on local autonomy.
  We have got to stop prefacing our objections by saying that, while the
  execution of this legislation is faulty, we agree with its laudable
  objectives. No. What we agree with is some of the rhetoric used to sell it,
  invocations of ideals like excellence and fairness. NCLB is not a step in the
  right direction. It is a deeply damaging, mostly ill-intentioned law, and no
  one genuinely committed to improving public schools (or to advancing the
  interests of those who have suffered from decades of neglect and oppression)
  would want to have anything to do with it.

  The party line, of course, is that all these requirements are meant to make
  public schools improve, and that forcing every state to test every student
  every year (from third through eighth grades and then again in high school)
  is intended to identify troubled schools in order to "determine who needs
  extra help," as President Bush put it.

  To anyone who makes this claim with a straight face, we might respond by
  asking two questions.

  First, how many schools will NCLB-required testing reveal to be troubled that
  were not previously identified as such? For the last year or so, I have
  challenged defenders of the law to name a single school anywhere in the
  country whose inadequacy was a secret until yet another wave of standardized
  test results was released. So far I have had no takers.

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  And second, of the many schools and districts that are obviously struggling,
  how many have received the resources they need, at least without a court
  order? If conservatives are sincere in saying they want more testing in order
  to determine where help is needed, what has their track record been in
  providing that help? The answer is painfully obvious, of course: Many of the
  same people who justify more standardized tests for information-gathering
  purposes have also claimed that more money doesn't produce improvement. The
  Bush administration's proposed budgets have fallen far short of what states
  would need just to implement NCLB itself, and those who point this out are
  dismissed as malcontents.

  Tougher Standards Don't Make Grade

  So, what have the results been of high-stakes testing to this point? To the
  best of my knowledge, no positive effects have ever been demonstrated, unless
  you count higher scores on these same tests. More low-income and minority
  students are dropping out, more teachers (often the best ones) are leaving
  the profession, and more mind-numbing test preparation is displacing genuine
  instruction. Why should anyone believe that annual do-or-die testing mandated
  by the federal government will lead to anything different? Moreover, the
  engine of this legislation is punishment.

  Who will be left undisturbed and sitting pretty? Private schools and
  companies hoping to take over public schools. In the meantime, various
  corporations are already benefiting. As The Wall Street Journal stated in
  December 2003, "Teachers, parents, and principals may have their doubts about
  No Child Left Behind. But business loves it." Apart from the obvious bonanza
  for the giant companies that design and score standardized tests, WSJ further
  states "hundreds of 'supplemental service providers' have already lined up to
  offer tutoring, including Sylvan, Kaplan Inc. and Princeton Review Inc. ¨
  Kaplan says revenue for its elementary- and secondary-school division has
  doubled since No Child Left Behind passed."

  In addition to testing and tutoring profits, corporate impact is also seen in
  the burgeoning sales of software to track student performance and interpret
  test data; classes for administrators and teachers to master test-prep
  techniques; and mid-career professional development courses to enable
  teachers to retain their "highly qualified" status.

  Does Pubic Education Graduate?

  How we take on the Tougher Standards movement may depend partly on practical
  considerations, such as where we can have the greatest impact. Those of us
  who see little benefit at all from standardized tests in their current forms
  need to remember that this is not an all-or-nothing crusade but a movement
  that can proceed incrementally. One way to begin is by fighting for the
  principles most likely to generate widespread support.

  For example, most professional organizations, even those known for their
  relentless advocacy of the standards-and-testing agenda, have acknowledged
  that there is "virtually unanimous agreement among experts that no single
  measure should decide a student's academic fate." Even the companies that
  manufacture and sell the tests have come to this conclusion. To make students
  repeat a grade or deny them diplomas on the basis of a single exam is
  unconscionable–yet many states are doing so or planning to do so. This issue
  is not a bad point of entry for potential activists. It may be persuasive
  even to politicians who have not thought much about these issues and
  otherwise accept the slogans of standards and accountability.

  Similarly, even people who are unwilling to dispense with standardized
  testing altogether may be open to persuasion that these tests should not be
  the only means by which students or schools are evaluated, inasmuch as they
  miss (or misrepresent) many aspects of student learning that ought to be
  assessed some other way. They should not be imposed by fiat on all schools in
  the state, with the result that communities are prevented from making their
  own decisions; should not be administered too often; are inappropriate for
  young children; and should be used only to rate, never to rank (since the
  goal is to derive useful information, not to create winners and losers and
  thereby discourage schools from working together).

  This is not to say that we shouldn't also be inviting people to question
  ideological assumptions that are harder to dislodge — to consider, for
  example, that a preoccupation with results and achievement can in itself
  interfere with learning or that educational progress need not (and, to some
  extent, cannot) be reduced to numbers. But even someone who resists those
  ideas may agree that it is wrong to make a student's future hinge on a
  standardized test.
  
Alfie Kohn is a RESIST supporter who writes and speaks widely on human behavior,
education, and parenting. He is the author of eleven books on these issues
(including The Schools Our Children Deserve and The Case Against Standardized
Testing). This piece was adapted from several of the articles on his web site,
www.alfiekohn.org.

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