The
following article reveals why tutoring math and reading after
school and during the summer is so important. Teachers, parents and taxpayers need to take notice. One of the
reasons Stilwell’s Learning Center has been so successful is that we involve each
student in their learning.
What do standardized tests actually
test? Why are they needed?
Some of your
children have just finished end of the year testing to see how the child and
schools have progressed this year. The
question is, “What do the tests really measure?”
Veteran
educator Marion Brady helps answer that question and its consequences for
teaching and learning. Brady has written history and world culture textbooks
(Prentice-Hall), professional books,
numerous nationally distributed columns,
and courses of study. His 2011 book, “What’s Worth Learning,” asks and answers
this question: What knowledge is absolutely essential for every learner? His
course of study for secondary-level students, called “Connections:
Investigating Reality,” is free for downloading here. Brady’s website is
www.marionbrady.com.
By Marion
Brady (Article from washingtonpost.com)
A headline in
the January 26, 2009, issue of Forbes magazine reads: “Bill Gates: It’s the
Teacher, Stupid”
The article
that follows says that on a conference call with journalists, “Gates pointed
out that experience (as measured by years on the job) and master’s degrees
(which carry great weight in teacher hiring) show no bearing on whether someone
will be a great teacher or a mediocre one.”
Gates’
opinions are important. He’s done as much as anyone or more to shape current
education policy in America, and his focus on teachers — the good ones as
miracle workers, and the tenure-protected bad ones as the main cause of poor
school performance — has pushed aside interest in and dialogue about other
social and institutional factors affecting school performance. He’s spent
millions trying to pinpoint what makes a teacher great. He’s reached no firm
conclusion, but thinks the great ones are easily identified. They’re the ones
who raise scores standardized tests — and to school reformers like Gates, test
scores are infallible indicators of quality.
The truth is
that teaching—trying to shape minds—is hard, complicated work. Claims that
class size, school size, teacher education, and teacher experience make no
difference in performance is sufficiently at odds with common sense to require
an explanation.
Like most
people, Gates believes that learning is a product of teaching. That assumption
is the bedrock of traditional schooling. It’s taken for granted by newspaper
and magazine editors, syndicated columnists, and talking heads on television.
It shapes nearly all commercially produced teaching materials. It’s how
schooling is portrayed in movies and on television. It’s why traditionally
arranged classroom furniture is in rows facing front, why most teachers talk a
lot, assign pages in textbooks, ask questions about what’s been said and read.
It’s the conventional wisdom.
Teachers
teach, learners learn, and standardized tests monitor how well the process is
going. The tests measure a quantity—the amount of information taught, minus the
amount not learned or learned and forgotten. Subtraction yields a single,
precise number convenient for sorting and labeling kids, teachers, schools,
school systems, states, nations.
Simple and
straightforward. Right?
There’s a
now-familiar ancient Chinese proverb which, loosely translated, says, “Tell me and I’ll forget. Show me and I’ll
remember. Involve me and I’ll understand.”
That’s three
very different approaches to teaching—telling, showing, and involving. The first two lend themselves to standardized testing.
The third one—the only one that really works—doesn’t. It says that what needs
to be evaluated are the outcomes of personal experience, and personal
experience is very likely to be too individual, too idiosyncratic, too much a
product of a teachable moment exploited or created by the teacher, for its
outcome to be evaluated by machine-scored standardized test items.
Involved learners don’t just read about plants; they’re
outside, identifying, examining, and classifying, the weeds and whatever else
is growing around the school. Involved learners aren’t filling out worksheets
about geometric principles; they’re determining the height of the school’s
flagpole by measuring angles and lengths of shadows.
Teachers doing
those kinds of things are usually older, better educated, and more experienced,
but high-stakes testing’s single-minded focus on scores has reduced them to
simply guessing what’s probably going to be on the test and hammering it to
near death. Experiences that create understanding? When test scores can dictate
what happens to you, your students, the school’s principal, and the school,
understanding runs a distant second to filling in the right bubble on the
answer sheet.
It took me
about 15 years in the classroom—and a federally funded 1960s “think freshly”
initiative—to accept that what mattered most wasn’t what I said but what kids
did. When I made that radical switch, I began a search that continues, a search
for experience-creating activities (a) so interesting, the teacher can leave
the room and nobody notices, (b) so useful, the activity’s relevance is
self-evident, (c) so complex, the smartest kid in the class is intellectually
challenged, (d) so real-world, perceptions of who’s smartest constantly shift,
(e) so theoretically sound, the systemically integrated nature of all knowledge
is obvious, (f) so wide-ranging, the activities cover the core curriculum (and much
more), (g) so varied, every critical thinking skill is exercised, (h) so
scalable, concepts developed on a micro level adequately model macro phenomena,
(j) so effective, when the activities themselves are forgotten, their benefits
are fixed permanently in memory.
The raw
material for creating a near-infinite number of activities that meet those nine
criteria isn’t hard to find. It lies within the property boundaries of every
school or randomly chosen slice of real life. Finding it is mostly a matter of looking
at the too-familiar and the taken-for-granted until it becomes “strange enough”
to see.
Modern school reform based on test
scores as the main accountability measure — supported by the Business Roundtable; the U.S. Chamber
of Commerce; the National Governors Association; the Gates, Broad and Walton
Foundations; some big-city mayors, among others—have engineered an educational train wreck. They took over an
institution struggling to replace the minimally productive 19th Century idea
that learning is a product of teaching with the demonstrably better idea that
learning is a product of the activities of learners. Then, instead of asking
educators how they could help with the transition, they slammed the door in
educators’ faces and wrote standards and tests that have locked the sterile
19th Century view of teaching even more rigidly in place.
For millions
of kids, it’s too late to undo the damage they’ve done. But if parents and
other concerned citizens make enough noise, the giant, tax-wasting, kid-abusing,
craft-and-profession destroying, super-standardizing, multibillion dollar
testing juggernaut that’s perpetuating a stupid idea of what it means to
educate and be educated, can be stopped.
If that can be
made to happen, teachers can pick up where they left off before they were
rudely interrupted—trying to figure out how kids learn best.
Still, we will
come away from this reform era having learned a couple of useful lessons: One is that no machine can measure the quality of complex, emotion-filtered, experience-based
learning. And the second: If you’re testing the wrong thing, there’s no reason
to keep score.
I own and direct Stilwell’s Learning Center. Prospective clients bring their children to me for an initial evaluation. This initial session is free. Here are some of the concerns I hear from parents:
