History suggests that the
unexpected but oft-experienced "law of unintended consequences" has an insidious property, it takes no prisoners.
The “law” applies to the
present overreaching, untested, massive, and intellectually questionable
national deployment of corporately developed standardized tests as a singular
approach to achieving accountability. Not exhibited by its advocates, the
self-assessment to recognize consequences?
The most egregious
strategic effects of present testing tactics will take time to materialize, but
clues are already wafting through the halls of K-12; the early ones, the losses
of good teachers to invalid evaluation, plus a wave of loss of the spirit that
drives real classroom commitment and teaching.
There is, however, another
negative of present testing, in the focus, verbiage surrounding its critique
and defense, and perhaps the attention of those who mediate appearance of
issues in our media. Media attention is so consumed with the testing
issue that an array of factors that will impact future K-12 are being ignored
or downgraded. Strategically, ones of major import are ignoring the
broader sources of accountability, core change in the model of K-12, and how
present evolution of information and technology will either enhance or further
damage U.S. K-12 education.
We are not embracing
either wise assessment, or 21st century learning; how much of a lead do we give
the rest of the world before reaching for America's education bootstraps
instead of just pushing a “test” button?
Accountability
If there is one term that
has been the watchword of the current K-12 reform it is “accountability.”
Connoting answerability, blameworthiness, responsibility, and the word has been
employed as the ultimate put-down for some of our best and brightest who have
raised questions about both the credibility and coverage of the present testing
logic and applications. The riposte goes: Accountability can’t
exist without an accounting and metrics to express the results, ergo, the
standardized testing being imposed can be quantified and is the sine qua non
for assessment -- you don’t want our teachers accountable? Do you still
transport your dog on the roof of your car?
The locus of
responsibility for K-12 achievement is the next gambit in the game. Who
is the closest to the desired product, the results of the testing? In
actuality, the mechanism of performance in that testing is self-evidently, the
test-taker, if one deletes educational administrators setting up teaching to
the tests, offering in advance test contents, or changing answers. We
can’t lay that trip on students because they have neural nets still in the
process of development, and they have parents who vote, or some social
conscience gets roiled when children are targeted. Next closest to the action,
the teacher, by current thinking, learning master, drill sergeant, Pied Piper,
all in one expendable, substitutable package.
Regrettably, the platoon
of academics who have been advocating value-added assessments of teachers
appears to have one oar in the water in both the reasoning underlying science of
explanation, and in the measurement methodologies necessary to assign to the
classroom teacher unique causality for even student memory reacquisition.
The litany of most competing explanations for student testing
outcomes has been displayed in the
professional literature; the leadership forcing the decision to massively but
naively test what is now being tested appears to lack the most basic elements
of social science research literacy.
But even more elemental, where does the logic and influence chain start for how students
are being prepared, even for testing that
may not generate a learning supply chain to knowledge? Is present VAM
simply a combination of myopia and banality; when your only tool is the hammer
of a standardized test, every teacher looks like a nail?
At what point do America’s hiding or sheltered cadre of failed superintendents and principals, and related
state bureaucrats enter the act? Should the teacher bear the
responsibility for scripted lesson plans and other choices from above denying
their training, intellectual sovereignty, and response to a complex environment
that must be continually assessed to maintain the social interaction and
communication that is the core stuff of teaching? Should they be directly
accountable for uncontrollable student life environments that even tactically
effect cognition, or for the failures of parents?
Fundamentally, K-12
leaderships, including school boards have been handed a “get-out-of-jail-free
card” in the present manipulated reform movement. Is this believable when
those resources are not held accountable for fraudulent school levies, or when
the very lack of leadership hamstrings teachers’ capabilities to overcome
underachievement by students, or when curriculum that is flawed is imposed on
the classroom, or when a school’s principal bullies are its superintendent, or
principal, or assistant principal? The Lee Hirsch documentary “Bully,”
and its clueless school administrators, are not just rhetorical asides. An organization is a complex
system, functioning well or failing based on all of its constituents, linked to
how it responds to external systems, but cause and effect start at the peak.
Lastly, how much of
present perceived public K-12 deficits traces to the accumulative effects of
decades of poor topside leadership nationally, whether by its unions, or by
intellectually challenged state departments of education, or by the priorities
ignored by the U.S. Department of Education for decades, or by permitting a
corporate cabal to dominate by lobbying the creation of the learning contents
of our K-12 schools, and for decades, by the sourcing including design of
textbook and teaching materials?
There is more than
probable cause to aggressively question the present massive testing schemes,
and see them nationally as an assiduously orchestrated mob mentality rather
than ethical pursuit of K-12 systemic change.
Fear of Failing?
As many writers have
maintained, walking into too many 21st century classrooms in 2012 is pretty much like walking into their early 20th century progenitor except for
the luster of plastics and stainless materials that instill a false sense of
modernity. The sage is still on the stage, frequently obsolete textbooks
are still on desks, the rubrics are from the last century, and the highest
level of technology present is being surreptitiously exercised with the thumbs
of the occupants of those desks. Why is the present cadre of K-12 shakers
and movers paranoid, or so lacking in self-confidence that the dull cadence of
what they knew decades ago is the only grist for current process?
There is little argument
that USDOE and America’s public K-12 leadership have failed miserably in
grabbing their own pedagogical bootstraps to create, develop, construct, test,
and promote more advanced information and communication models that improve learning
and knowledge creation. Note with prejudice, and emphasis, that
memorization of facts, but even of paradigms, models, algorithms, formulas, and
on, are not learning per se, nor is learning per se
knowledge. It is the difference between capturing for retrieval
reductionist facts versus high order neural processing that includes the
capacity for generalization of what is learned to other contexts, the capacity
to apply cognitive abilities to problem solving, and going beyond what is
reliably connected to creativity built upon new connections.
Fatally, the K-12
education establishment failed the most primitive test of using the tools of
science in seeking its own well-being, by failing to demand that the kind of
testing being imposed on its own ranks first survive the blend of logical and
experimental testing that would accompany any material device or drug or
service issuing from a competent private sector company before mass
distribution. To add insult to injury, there is no remediation path for
the damaged or cheated users – student or teacher or parent – of standardized
testing to seek any consumer protection or redress for failed or disabling
cognitive results.
The efforts that should be
consuming both policy gurus and educators are: Evaluating the seat time model;
absorbing contemporary concepts of information that circumscribe concepts of
communication central to K-12 learning; evaluate technology as it becomes
intrinsic to supporting the student-teacher dyad; rebuilding rubrics around
both contemporary subject matter and digital and social tools; adopting an
experimental mindset, that makes routine classroom or adjunct experiments on
what works, and a standard of practice; research on roles to be played by both
online learning and by enhanced parent-school collaborative learning processes;
rethinking the whole spectrum of teacher education and subsequent intellectual
maintenance; and finally, modernizing K-12 administrative leadership by
adopting and training understanding that has been available from other
disciplines for decades.
Down the chart, put an end
to the billions of dollars being expended for new school bricks & mortar,
and sports facilities, at the expense of expenditures that directly effect
learning. Creatively explore both alternative organization designs for
K-12, and organizational arrangements that would functionally combine the
assets of school systems in contiguous jurisdictions to leverage their learning
resources, tying them with state-of-art bandwidth to create virtual school
chains with scale advantages.
Utopian? The
composite might be if its equivalent didn’t occur every day in our private
sector, in organizations that practice creativity, employ excellence as the
essence of a mission statement, and field more intellect and technology than
emanate from the majority of our educational complexes. A paradox,
because of who is pushing standardized testing as reform? Not really, if
you recognize that not all of America’s private sector embraces a single model
for function, or prospers on the basis of innovation and management excellence,
versus greed, lobbying, imitation, monopoly practices, or deceiving the market.
Standardized Test
Questions Versus Knowledge
The most absurd property
of America's convoluted organization of elementary and secondary education is
the belief – tempting to brand it parody – that information, theory, and
knowledge in one state are not equal to another state. The most obvious
example is the hot button issue of evolution versus creationism, almost bizarre
in its occasional dominance of states’ governmental actions on K-12.
But the larger issue of
curricula has been the elephant in the room's shadows for generations.
For perspective, the issue has become increasingly contentious because it
upsets the core balance of K-12 and especially 9-12 education. What are
known, hard sciences’, biological sciences’, neural sciences’, and even social
sciences’ content has been increasing at an increasing rate in the last few
decades. Facing that environment for learning, K-12 education encounters a
formidable challenge: Its teachers could be deficient before they make it
into the classroom; it's educational materials can become obsolete in a school
year; superintendents and principals have not been recruited to deal
intellectually with that challenge; and vexing is the balance in K-12 between
stopping its mission with the vanilla core of relevant disciplines, versus
pushing the envelope. Undershoot and the gap between secondary and
postsecondary soars; push the envelope for currency and the deficits of both
human and learning resources greatly increase the risk of failure.
There is a solution set to
this issue. It starts with transparency, full disclosure of the
resources, reasoning, protocols, and products of all present
corporately-sourced standardized K-12 tests to a consortium of legitimate
national representatives of the disciplines scoped by that testing. The
purpose, to establish unequivocally what is now effectively being installed, de
facto, as America's K-12 curricula. What is tested quickly becomes
what is taught, and over time, what is accepted as dogma about content.
Remove from our corporate
test vendors the authority to determine what specifics are tested when that
form of testing is relevant. Simultaneously, instead of the flawed logic
of VAM, fund research on testing that can assess the spread of learning
products sought by the U.S., and pursue large scale studies designed to
legitimately identify the school, classroom, and environmental factors and
factor weights that predict the diverse longitudinal effects of prior
education.
Also coincidentally,
create a national interdisciplinary effort centered in our universities, not NGA's retro "common core," to
assemble models of contemporary subject matter content applicable across levels of knowledge
development of our youth, not necessarily aligned along seat time logic.
The product of this could ultimately be a genuine national curriculum for
elementary and secondary work, possibly also setting up the basis for
rethinking the basic organization of those conventions. The “boo birds”
can already be heard, squawking that local control of education has been
violated. Alexander Hamilton proposed a general model for governance that fits K-12 education, worth reflection:
Centralize goals for the nation, but decentralize the implementation that
leads to their achievement.
Balance the Portfolio
The nation and media need
to deal with the dumbing-down of K-12 learning pragmatically being installed by
standardized testing, challenge the corporate naïveté, dogmatic thinking
creating it, and the political ideologies imposing it. What is now
dominating K-12 assessment has roughly the credibility of last decade’s claims
of WMD in Iraq; that didn't exactly work out as planned.
But even more important,
while the dialogue in the public square needs to continue to abrade the current
testing mantra, it also needs to address in parallel the above issues.
The risk of not doing so is also an unintended consequence – that some
sanity returns to testing, the one-note version gets put back in Pandora’s box, and diverse assessment emerges, but the K-12 education establishment simply
breathes a great sigh of relief and snaps back to an obsolete future.
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