May 2007 Archives

Editor's note: While Deborah Meier travels in China, Diane Ravitch shares some quick thoughts and recommendations from her summer reading list. The Bridging Differences dialogue will return soon.

With Deborah safely in China, I can now turn to my summer reading.

I am trying to start a new book, so I am reading quite a lot of books about the business model in education and also books about American business. The classic in this genre is Raymond Callahan's "Education and the Cult of Efficiency," which I will re-read. I am currently reading Larry Cuban's "The Blackboard and the Bottom Line: Why Schools Can't Be Businesses."

I have a stack of books that I plan to read this summer, as I am sure all of us do. Of course, some of our summer reading should be pure froth, and—in that category—I just finished reading Stefan Kanfer's "Ball of Fire," a very enjoyable biography of Lucille Ball, one of my favorite comedians.

If you want to learn more about the issues that Deborah and I have been debating, you can read our books. For example, Deborah Meier's "The Power of Their Ideas" or my book, "Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform." By the way, I am often asked why the subtitle on that book is different in the hardcover and the paperback. It is because the editor from Simon & Schuster insisted on the original subtitle ("A Century of Failed School Reforms"). She thought that the word "failed" had to be somewhere in the title, and I didn't want it at all. I thought that the book was about the great debates and controversies in American education in the past century, and she was thinking about marketing. She let me change the subtitle for the paperback. If I had had my way, which I didn't, I would have made the subtitle for the book: "Anti-Intellectualism in American Education," because I saw it as a follow-up to Richard Hofstadter's 1962 classic "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life." But my editor, a powerful figure in the publishing industry, said that any use of that nine-syllable word would send the book crashing into the remainders pile immediately.

Here are a few books that I strongly recommend: E.D. Hirsch Jr.'s "The Knowledge Deficit." This book does a fine job of explaining why children's achievement tails off between fourth grade and eighth grade. And I highly recommend two books from the wonderful Jeanne Chall: "Learning to Read: The Great Debate" and "The Academic Achievement Challenge." If every educator read Chall's book on reading, there would be no more reading wars. Similarly, her last book, which was published shortly after her death, sums up everything she had learned about the research on achievement. Everything she wrote was leavened by her wisdom and common sense.

Enjoy your summer vacation. When Deborah is back, we'll be in the same place, same time, trading blows and bouquets.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 11:29 AM | Permalink | 4 Comments | Recommend

Editor's note: Deborah Meier is currently traveling in China. While she is away, the Bridging Differences blog will go on a brief hiatus. The blog will return on June 11. The following is Diane Ravitch's final new entry before the break begins.

Dear Deb,

No, we are not going to agree. We just can't bridge our differences when it comes to curriculum. I hate to write this while you are in China, but I guess it will still be here when you get back. As far as I can tell, in your view, curriculum is whatever the teacher decides to do today, perhaps in response to an "interesting question," or something that comes up incidentally in the class discussion.

I am not sure where you got the idea that schools for the "rich" don't have a curriculum. I recall looking through the curriculum statements of private schools some years ago and finding that most of them had a curriculum that was clear and very rich with content. It did not appear that teachers were expected to make it up every day as they went along.

You seem to think that any set curriculum is a form of tyranny over the human mind. Do you feel this way about IB courses and AP courses? These are probably our best current examples of specified curricula, and to my knowledge, they seem to be very popular, especially in advantaged schools and affluent districts.

Yes, there is most certainly an important element of equity that inheres in a set curriculum. It is the best way to assure that a course called "Algebra I" has the same level of challenge as a course with the same title in a different school. It is the best way to make sure that poor kids have access to the same ideas and skills as their affluent peers. Researchers know that course titles often hide wide variation, and the variation tends to favor the most advantaged schools, where the course content sets higher expectations.

And yes, in a country as diverse as ours, there is value in supporting the broad dissemination of knowledge and a common intellectual culture. A common intellectual culture does not mean that everyone should think alike, but that everyone has a (more or less) shared vocabulary and deep enough knowledge about important ideas so that people can engage in arguments. You can't argue with people unless you share a certain base of knowledge and values. Nor can you have a debate unless the words mean the same things to people who are debating. You and I can argue fruitfully (most of the time) because we have so much in common (sorry!). We can disagree because we share a wide range of words, idioms, terms, and experiences. We both know a great deal about our shared history, and that makes it possible for us to argue about it.

If most Americans don't have a clue why there was a Civil War; what happened during Reconstruction; what Lincoln said and did; what the Plessy decision held; what racial segregation meant; what the Brown decision decided; who Martin Luther King Jr. was; what the civil rights movement was about, etc., then how can they possibly understand events today? Having shared background knowledge and a common vocabulary of words and ideas does not determine what we think; it enables us to talk to one another.

Debbie, I respect your wisdom and experience, but I will never, never, never agree with your anarchistic ideas about curriculum.

Have fun in China.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:35 AM | Permalink | 7 Comments | Recommend

Editor's note: Deborah Meier is in China for three weeks where she has been invited to give a keynote address in Shanghai at the World Conference on Transformation of Classroom Teaching. She also plans to speak to students at the Institute of Curriculum and Instruction at East China Normal University. She will return to the blog in June.

Dear Diane,

When you read this I’ll be in China.

But I did take a peek at your response before I left, Diane. The trouble is that my definition (there can be two or more) of being well-educated is closer to driving than it is to learning the kinds of knowledge that the tests you describe measure. (And with nowhere near the accuracy you suggest. For example, much depends on what kind of “distractors”—wrong answers—you imbed the “right answer” in, etc). It’s those hard-won habits that have stood us in good stead, even as we’ve forgotten the answers to the history questions you describe. But it’s the intellectual habits that every teacher should be attending to, even if it’s very time-consuming. That’s what schooling is primarily for and what, for me, everything else must come second. It’s hard work, but my goal is precisely to stop students from asking “WILL IT BE ON THE TEST”! The kind of attentiveness Shanker was describing (called cramming for the test) leads to bad habits. Twelve years of such bad habits are not good for most of us in real life.

Or maybe its just that I’ve had to depend on “habits” given my more rote memory! Maybe we all prefer the kind of education that suits our strengths?

But reading your comments and Wesley Null’s response leads me to realize that we are not going to “settle” this issue to everyone’s satisfactions. But why must we? The trouble is when we rush to turning our ideas into the law, then one of us wins and one loses, versus learning from each other about the plusses and minuses of our differences in actual practice.

In responding to Wesley, I wrote: “The trouble is, Wesley, that the way you and Diane would deal with curriculum doesn't make us think at all—us ordinary teachers, the ones who connect with the young, or their parents or community. All it requires of us is to ‘follow’ it, with our own pedagogical tricks. Indeed, in contrast, my notion of curriculum requires all of us to do that hard thinking about what's critical and why, and to defend it to our students and community.” I don’t object, in short, to schools that choose to follow a curriculum designed by others—by no means. Or one that rests its work on short-answer tests, but why do they want to insist that I do the same?

I know: equity. But that’s assuming that equity requires “sameness”, uniformity, etc. The rich can get high quality by following different paths—why not the poor?

The other answer: to create a common culture. Yet I've never found it hard to communicate or bond intellectually with adults whose schooling was very different than mine—especially the curriculum. It's an idea I've heard often for which all the empirical evidence I know suggests otherwise. I refer not only to Canadians and English, but Frenchmen, Egyptians and Chinese, not to mention those who went to different American schools. In fact, my definition of being well-educated erases parochial differences in curriculum and unites us in a larger community of thinkers. Maybe the one requirement might be that we all take one course on the argument itself (see Gerald Graff).

I suggest that there never was a common core that really worked for the ends you hope for. (See Rothstein, "The Way We Were?," on the state of common knowledge in 1890, 1910, 1940, etc). Alas or otherwise, our “common curriculum” is the pop media—and maybe directly tackling it might serve future citizens better than the curriculum academics are inclined to invent.

The best education I ever had was over the dining room table, as adults talked politics and culture (and how they dealt with the daily realities) in the presence of the young and with due respect for their contributions. Fortunately, my school was willing to pick up on those same arguments and concerns and to appreciate the spirit behind them. My personal favorite schools today do the same: they recreate a multi-age dining room conversation. Sometimes it’s even over the heads of the young—which works fine if no judgment is made about one’s intelligence based on this inevitable fact. Powerful adults are attractive to kids, and when we invite them to join us on matters we think important they often will, with enthusiasm. Then they will remember those facts that help them join the conversation. Ditto for “the power of their ideas” (hence the title of a book I wrote) and our joining the kids as they “read the world” in ways that can enlarge our understanding as well.

It’s the standards for such conversation that unite curriculum and pedagogy, what at CPESS we called Habits of Mind and that others codify in other ways.

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:00 AM | Permalink | 3 Comments | Recommend

Deb,

You will not be surprised to learn that I agree with you about the value of a road test for licensing future drivers. If you can't actually operate a car with safety and confidence, then you should not be licensed to drive, no matter how well you score on the written exam.

As it happens, many of the studies that are taught in school are not comparable to driving a car. Many of them involve not only "habits of mind" but the acquisition of skills and knowledge that cannot be evaluated in any way that is akin to a road test. How should we test a student's ability to read? We might have them read out loud. That is a good thing for a teacher to do with regularity. For testing purposes, though, it would be very time-consuming, and for an entire class it might take days to listen to each student read selections of varying levels of difficulty. Or we might give the students a test of reading comprehension in which they read an essay or poem or story and then answered questions to demonstrate that they understand what they have read. The latter method, in the eyes of most school officials, is preferable because it takes less time and less money to administer and turns out to be a reliable indicator of student reading ability. It also makes it possible to compare student performance and to gauge whether they are making progress in relation to what students of their age typically know.

I think the same argument could be made for assessing students' knowledge of mathematics, science, and other subjects. I prefer to see students writing research papers in history, to be sure. Most fill-in-the-bubble style history questions are extremely superficial. And yet, superficial as they are, such questions too (if they aren't too stupid, too superficial, too vapid) can quickly identify students who really don't have a clue about whatever history they studied and they can be designed to show different levels of difficulty and knowledge. For example, the latest NAEP test of U.S. history has a 12th grade question that shows a map of the continental U.S. around 1800, on which a dotted line traces a route. Students are asked to identify whether "the expedition whose route is shown was undertaken to explore the: a) lands taken in the Mexican War; b) lands taken from England in the War of 1812; c) Louisiana Purchase; or d) Gadsden Purchase." Students need to be able to look at that map and know that they are looking at the expedition exploring the Louisiana Purchase. There is no way to fake it, other than a lucky guess.

I am all in favor of exhibitions, research papers, and other means of demonstrating what students know and can do. These ways of assessing give teachers an in-depth look at what students have learned. These are the right tools for the individual teacher and for Sizer-style schools. More power to them and to you.

But you acknowledge that these are not the right tools for a district or a state or a nation that is trying to see how well students in fourth grade or eighth grade or twelfth grade are doing. You suggest that large-scale standardized testing should be sample-based, like NAEP. This would assure that there are no "stakes" for any individual student. Quite honestly, I don't know what the right answer is. I know that there are testing experts and education economists who argue that having stakes is very important, that they create incentives for higher performance, that one reason NAEP 12th grade results are so poor is because students know the test has no stakes. Al Shanker often told audiences that his students would ask him, "Will it be on the test?" If he said no, they didn't bother to learn what he was teaching; if he said yes, they were very attentive.

Maybe our readers will weigh in and help me on this one. Or we should call in some psychometricians.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:20 AM | Permalink | 16 Comments | Recommend

Dear Diane,

Here's my bottom line re testing: Wherever possible, we should be relying on direct evidence of the domain we're investigating. And the final judges should be close to the action being judged. If they need or value information from standardized tests, they should be free to do so. (Otherwise large-scale standardized testing should be sample-based for the purpose of gaining information on trends, regions, subjects, etc—not on individual students or schools)

We're always in the end resting our case on fallible judgment. Until and unless we turn ourselves into robots. The further my evidence is from the object of judgment, the less reliable. Interesting, yes, but. If we reduce state/national testing to sample-size we might also be able to increase its depth and value for research and policy.

If I want to know if I should trust Sam to drive a car on his own, the best source for deciding this is to ask someone who has driven with him. I could design a more efficient method—a test that "correlates" with some other criteria for measuring good driving (number of accidents?). But even so, once the word was "out", the correlation would disappear. Even on a driving road test, if I know exactly what they are going to ask me to do (and where), I may narrow my practice down to those particulars. On manual cars, stopping and starting on a hill was the supreme test. "Lucky" were those whose test route didn't include a hill, "phew". No more hours and hours of practicing for that skill. If I want information on the status of U.S. drivers, not just Sam, I'd sample the population with a good road test.

For all its faults, compared with the written test, the road test still is the real thing. The hardest bubble-in or "constructed text" paper-and pencil test on driving won't be of any use to me at all in deciding whether to hand my car over to Sam. Yet what we have done in schooling is try to make the paper-and-pencil driver's test harder, and give it more often, and eliminate the performance test entirely. (Do we agree so far?)

Some 20 years ago Ted Sizer wrote a book called "Horace's Compromise" based upon the idea of starting off by asking what the "road test" is for K-12 schooling—and then planning backward. Of course, the backward plan depends on how rich and deep and robust our goals are—the road test. Instead the nation has embarked on the "planning backward" part of his idea, but scrapped the road test and replaced it with simply more and more paper-and-pencil tests.

When Sizer put forth his idea he was called a utopian. Schools like mine in East Harlem (CPESS) were started simply to prove he was not a utopian. And we did. But it can't be replicated by mandate. Short cuts galore have been tried—but they lead to a different end.

The task has to start with asking what do we want those kids to show they can do before we hand over that diploma. Sizer-style schools still exist—and in the month of May the Coalition of Essential Schools hosts a nationwide display of their "exhibitions"—their road tests. Check out CES for the one nearest you. (There are several in NYC.)

But, here's the rub, Diane. They didn't all answer that question (what do you want "all kids" to show they can do?) the same way. Just as most private schools differ, so do they. Thus they too don't all have the same curriculum. I think that augurs well for the future of America and the world; some people think it augurs poorly. This is worth arguing about.

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 7:10 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

I always find myself in agreement with your judgments about teaching, which are invariably wise. Yet I am often, as in this instance, unable to follow your logic when applied to district-wide, statewide, or national-wide policies. Like you, I think it is wonderful to teach argument, to encourage students to think about alternative interpretations, to realize that their textbooks are not necessarily authoritative, to prepare for democratic life by thinking independently.

Still, it seems to me, unless I am misreading you, that you are opposed not only to tests, but to curriculum as well. Here and elsewhere, you have made clear your strong opposition to any standardized testing. Again, unless I wasn't listening closely enough, there is no standardized test that wins your approval. That's OK. It's a principled position, and you make a good case. But no matter how good your case, standardized testing is not going away, so I believe that we should try to come up with sensible ways to improve such testing and to limit the excessive test prep that is ruining so many classrooms.

You end with a swipe at the NAEP proficiency cut points. It's true that they have been criticized by various reviews; it is also true that the NAEP staff and board commissioned most of those reviews and have responded to them over the years. Without question, NAEP is the most heavily studied, analyzed, and evaluated testing program in the United States. I also think it is a better test than any state test that I have seen. If you want to know what it "covers," go to the NAEP website and you will find curriculum frameworks for every subject tested, as well as large numbers of sample questions in each subject. I don't know of any other test that is as forthcoming in describing in detail what it covers.

I find it harder to understand, however, what seems to be your opposition to curriculum. In good old-fashioned progressivist fashion, you want classrooms where teachers can explore a question that a student raises and make that question the topic of the day, the week, maybe longer. Presuming that in a class of two dozen students, there are at least two dozen questions, the entire semester could be spent exploring interesting questions raised by students. The teacher could wander from topic to topic or revisit an old topic or whatever.

This is a description, I would guess, of a school or a district in which there is no set curriculum. As you know better than most people, many teachers would find this mode of teaching to be extremely stressful. It is hard to prepare for the day's lesson when you don't know what it will be until Maria or Johnny raises an interesting question. (I remember when I was in school—probably junior high school—my friends and I used to raise "interesting questions" as a way to distract the teacher and pass the time in class on our terms, shooting the breeze, not hers.)

I truly don't see why you find it objectionable to know what the curriculum for each year's studies will be. Is it really so awful that many fifth-grade classes study the founding of the American nation and the American Revolution, or that eighth-graders are likely to study the Civil War? It would seem to me that teachers can organize their work better if they know what they are supposed to teach. And that within the limits of an organized curriculum, there is plenty of room for students to debate, argue, search for alternative explanations, explore alternative sources, etc.

This is a matter on which I expect we will never bridge our differences. I do believe that whatever the subject, be it science, history, or mathematics, it is valuable to have a curriculum, a definition of the topics and main ideas that will be taught during the course of the year. I believe that it is valuable for teachers, students, and even for parents, who know what their children will be learning. I don't see that this implies any diminution of the teacher's freedom to teach or the student's ability to raise questions and engage in debate and argument.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:25 AM | Permalink | 9 Comments | Recommend

Dear Diane,

I was speaking in North Carolina recently. In describing Central Park East's "Five Habits of Mind" I used, as an example of the "what if" habit: "Supposing we had lost the Civil War"—A lady in front of me laughed and said, "but we did".

Thus proving the value of another "habit of mind"—being able to place one's self in another person's shoes. Even if, as it says in the Mission Hill mission statement, it's a viewpoint one despises.

Do I imagine that all teachers, schools and districts, if left to their own devices, are likely to select our particular rigorous habits? No, I don't. But I have no greater faith in the federal government doing so, and even if they did, of being able to police it. Or wanting them to.

So-called "political correctness" is probably inevitable. Certain words, ideas and phrases seem banal in some periods of history and outrageous in others. I find it almost unbelievable how often the f-word is now used in respectable publications when up until about 20 years ago it was impossible for me to say the word aloud. My brother and I, in an act of great bravado in the early 1940s, went out into the deep forest surrounding our summer home and sang the word over and over as part of what he called the "F Opera." That's a rather tame example of the point I'm making.

In short, perhaps the only law I might like to make is that we teach everything as an argument—as though it were possible (if unwise) to hold a different view. Even in science I'd like to imagine the arguments that were made by the greatest scientists against ideas that soon became normative science. Like, so what's such a big deal about light traveling in a straight line? How else could it travel? Who said otherwise? Being able to "defend" one's ideas is only one form of evidence, but it's at least one form I'd like any graduate to be able to exercise.

It's in the silencing of those wonderful ideas that children bring into school with them at age 3, 4, 5 that we begin the process of closing their minds. Darrel at age 5, who insisted that rocks were an example of living things taught me how complex the idea of "living" vs. "nonliving" was. Sharon, age 6, made me rethink "up" and "down" in discussing what the first man on the moon saw. Frances, age 14, whose casual comment about how odd it was that the West Indies was in "the east" and the East Indies "in the west" as she pondered a typical world map on the wall of our school, set off conversations of a nature too few teachers allow themselves to explore. We spent 3 months on living/non-living thus forever ending any chance I had of completing NYC's kindergarten curriculum, and we turned maps projections into the center of our curriculum because Frances' question set everyone thinking. I wish it could be thus at every grade level.

With what pleasure Heidi Lyne (a former Mission Hill teacher) and I recall the semester Mission Hillers all studied "The Peopling of America"—in which her class got off onto "the dogging of America". Actually they simply got waylaid by the love of dogs that infused the classroom. How nice that their teacher found an excuse to stay on the topic of dogs for a bit.

I treasure this stubborn interest in what seems most essential—at the moment—vs. covering any amount of the "common core". It's the form of intelligence I value in my landscaper, plumber, or tree specialist. I don't want a "book answer", but a investigative, curious mind that is prepared to solve my novel problem. "Get a new engine", one car mechanic said, when in fact, all I needed was a mechanic with the curiosity to look further and notice that all I needed was a tightened screw.

We need a definition of "well-educated" that covers all the crafts, trades, professions or hobbies our fellow citizens engage in, plus that common one: being a citizen—of one's local community, state, nation and planet.

As for statistics, damn statistics, I wasn't using those statistics to argue for or against the USA's rank order. Assuming my data were accurate, I was noting that the ways in which we label particular scores affects us, and how arbitrary it is. It's like headlines that bemoan "only half" versus "nearly half". Incidentally, 5th graders don't take 8th grade tests but we have for a hundred years had no trouble claiming that some 5th graders read at an 8th grade level—and vice versa. It's not any harder to figure out how NAEP scores compare to international scores—and they suggest different conclusions about what it means to be proficient. The National Academy of Education, the Center for Research on Evaluation, and the Government Accountability Office all have criticized the NAEP benchmarks for just this reason. (I'd also want to know what the test "covers" et al before deciding how seriously to take the results.)

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 6:45 AM | Permalink | 5 Comments | Recommend

Dear Deb,

As you know, Mark Twain (or Disraeli or someone) once wrote that there are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics. Everyone in education, or so it seems, has learned how to present them in ways that bolsters whatever they want to do. Either, the sky is falling, or things have never been better.

Let me suggest that the statistics you offer are open to different interpretations, to be generous. I don't really know how anyone can say how students in Singapore or Sweden would perform IF they took a NAEP test, which they did not take. Why not just look at the international tests that were taken by students in the United States and many other nations? At least one need not hypothesize about what would have happened, but can look at the results of taking a common test (by the way, this makes my point about the value of having a common national test, rather than 50 different state tests).

On the TIMSS test of fourth grade science in 2003, our students scored significantly behind Singapore, Chinese Taipei, Japan, and Hong Kong. They scored significantly ahead of children from the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, and 13 other countries.

On the TIMSS test of fourth grade mathematics in 2003, our students scored significantly behind Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, the Netherlands, Latvia, Lithuania, the Russian Federation, England, and Hungary. They outscored Cyprus, Moldova, Italy, and 10 other countries (including Iran and Tunisia).

On the TIMSS test of eighth grade science in 2003, our students scored significantly behind Singapore, Chinese Taipei, Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan. Our students outscored most other countries, but many of them were not comparable, industrialized nations (e.g., Jordan, Iran, South Africa).

On the TIMSS test of eighth grade mathematics in 2003, our students scored significantly behind Singapore, Korea, Hong Kong, Chinese Taipei, Japan, Belgium-Flemish, the Netherlands, Estonia, and Hungary. Our students were tied with several other nations, including Malaysia, Latvia, the Russian Federation, and the Slovak Republic, and outperformed 25 others (including many Third World nations, such as Botswana, Lebanon, Ghana, and Morocco).

On the PISA tests (Program in International Assessment), which assesses 15-year-old students, the U.S. scores about average among the 27 nations on reading literacy. The highest-scoring nations in reading are Finland, Canada, and New Zealand. Among the nations that do better than the U.S. are Australia, Ireland, Korea, the United Kingdom, and Japan.

On the PISA tests of math and science literacy, the U.S. students are average. In math, our students score significantly behind Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Finland, Australia, Canada, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. In science, our students score significantly behind Korea, Japan, Finland, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.

The American Institutes for Research reviewed the TIMSS and PISA data and concluded that if one looked only at the 12 nations that participated in all the assessments, then American high school students' performance is consistently "mediocre," consistently ranking 8th or 9th among the 12 nations. That study can be found here.

Our fourth-grade students begin well (although the AIR authors say their performance is also "mediocre"). By the time they are 15, however, they are smack dab in the middle (or worse, according to AIR). Is that okay? Presumably we want to know whether our students are learning as much as their peers in similar nations. Maybe we can learn something from the results of these tests and improve our own curriculum and pedagogy. Maybe we can just shrug and say we don't care how they score in comparison to any other nation and that test scores don't tell us anything that we need to know.

Again, what I take away from all this is the value of a common test at different grade levels. And by the way, NAEP is not a "low-stakes test." It is a no-stakes test. It tests a sample of students. No student learns his or her score. No teacher learns his or her students' scores. You can't get closer to the definition of no-stakes than that.

As for Campbell's Law, I find it confusing. I take it to mean that any measure or information that is used for policymaking tends to be corrupted by its use. What should we base policymaking on then? Hunches, ideology, hopes, fears? I think we have to rely on some sort of reliable data. We should be talking about how to get data that can improve decisionmaking, how to make it better, how to refine it, how to make it more reliable, rather than disparaging any possibility of ever measuring anything meaningful.

Best,

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 7:30 AM | Permalink | 5 Comments | Recommend

Dear Diane,

I've also been pondering how we could resolve some of our disagreements about national testing—without necessarily resolving our differences on curriculum! Thanks for trying to word it succinctly (less than 500 words!). My response is twice as long, alas. But I wanted to approach it in a way that helped me think through why your solution (a national curriculum with a low-stakes test) doesn't work for me.

We're both distressed—to put it mildly—about the misleading misinformation we're fed about one or another school system's successes and failures. The following data, which I ran across recently, is an example of such mystification.

**Only 33 percent of Swedish 4th graders would meet NAEP's "proficiency or better" standards. (NAEP is the low-stakes National Assessment of Educational Proficiency test designed many years ago to collect data for the federal government, and increasingly being proposed for more high-stakes purposes.)

**Only half of Singapore's 8th graders would be labeled "proficient or better" if measured by NAEP.

These are two puzzlers since Swedish 4th graders and Singapore 8th graders are # 1 internationally. Here's another:

**While American 4th grade kids rank 3rd among 26 nations in science, only 29% measured "proficient or better" on NAEP.

These puzzling statistics look tame compared to the even wilder disparities we get when we compare kids in the nation's 50 states in math or literacy scores. What counts as advanced in some states barely makes basic in another. Even if these kinds of tests were semi-accurate at measuring reading or science achievement (which I have more doubts about than you do) they clearly aren't measuring the same thing. I can see why uniformity might have appeal.

Lee Shulman, in an essay written just a week ago for Carnegie Corp., echoes our concern. He evokes Campbell's Law: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor." No mention of "rewards and punishments" you'll note.

Something else worried Campbell. And Shulman.

You suggest that we could invent a measurement tool that wouldn't be subject to corruption or ideology. As long as it required agreement about what all kids are expected to learn, then I think the answer is "not likely" on either score. Maybe it could were it restricted to "basic" reading, writing and arithmetic standards. But if we're trying to better understand how our practices impact on the exercise of judgment—I do not think a national test based on a standardized national curriculum will do.

In my idle driving hours I imagine NY State announcing that, given the health and obesity crisis, a panel of experts recommend that we simplify phys ed, requiring high school graduates (unless physically handicapped) to learn to run a mile in 4 minutes (Advanced), 3 (Proficient), and so on. No high stakes attached. If every kid is tested I assume parents, schools, physical ed teachers, and above all kids would want to know how they did, even as they grumbled. Some would privately declare it impossible, but would wait for some politically more naive coach to mention it (like the little boy in The Emperor's Clothes). Others would view news stories about coaches who met their targets with skepticism. (One was a citywide sports magnet.) Schools might ask for more practice time by dropping football and basketball, which weren't being tested. Others would propose a similar test in all sports. Some would find reasons to exclude more kids based on new definitions of what constituted a physical handicap, some kids would try breaking their own legs, and some would just laugh. Some schools or coaches would get new stopwatches designed to meet the new standards. Those who noted that it seemed to have no effect on obesity—in fact it led to more snacking—would be ignored. Missing? Any lively and robust discussion at each school site on what role the school could play in defining and producing healthier children.

Furthermore, I'm not sure if many of the current testing maniacs would see merit in it unless the results were made public and comparisons available—in ways that willy-nilly create their own sanctions. I suspect that those that favor assessment primarily as a way of controlling—not for the purposes of gaining truthful information upon which to better discuss schooling practices—would create rank orders, offer rewards privately, etc. Some track coaches in the scenario above might applaud it because it provided a larger pool of potential runners to compete in the Olympics. Some might like it because only when we're in a crisis mode do we allow ourselves to do the "unthinkable"—like dismantling a long tradition of public education on the grounds that it is beyond saving.

Sampled Federal studies—ala the old NAEP, investments in research that matched local concerns, a new 8-year type study of the long-term impact of various different schools—these we could agree on, Diane.

It's amusing, sort of, that Harvard's Eleanor Duckworth and I were invited to China to discuss promising educational reforms by officials who think that the Chinese exam-based tradition is stifling the kind of creativity and ingenuity that they believe has made America technologically and scientifically so outstanding. They are looking for ways to produce well-educated youth whose ambitions are focused on more than getting the right answers on exams.* They might also discover that creativity and ingenuity if spread too widely have repercussions for democracy as well. Happily you and I agree about that.

Deborah

*See Daryl Smith and Gwen Garrison (Teachers College Record) "The Impending Loss of Talent: An Exploratory Study Challenging Assumptions About Testing and Merit".

Posted by Deborah Meier at 8:49 AM | Permalink | 4 Comments | Recommend

Dear Deb,

I think we just found a very important area of agreement! You said in your last post, “The fewer direct consequences there are—rewards or punishments—associated with such data collection, the greater the likelihood that it will be honest. We need less of the Texas ‘miracle’ and Enron-style data, and more of the ‘academic’ type.”

So maybe you are willing to agree with my plan for the reauthorization of NCLB. Yes, we should have national standards and national tests, but there should be no federal role in punishing or rewarding schools based on the results of the tests. You probably are still opposed to national standards, but you can’t have tests unless there is agreement about what is to be tested. The tests must be based on the curriculum and the standards.

So, yes, let the feds provide the extra money needed to educate children with disabilities, children who need to learn English, and children who are low-income. Let the feds run a sound research program. Let them award grants and fellowships to attract new teachers into important specialty fields where there are shortages. Let them hand out blue ribbons to successful schools. But keep the feds out of the business of telling schools how to reform themselves.

Having worked in the U.S. Department of Education, I can tell you that there are a lot of truly intelligent and thoughtful people there (many of them are the same people who were there 15 years ago when I worked there as Assistant Secretary in charge of the Office of Education Research and Information). Wonderful people, but I don’t think that there were many people who knew how to run a school. Frankly, there is no capacity at the federal level—not in the executive branch and not in the legislative branch—to tell the nation’s schools what they should do.

Some people think that state departments of education lack the capacity to run schools, which is why state takeovers have been such a big disappointment. Nonetheless, one of the end-of-the-line sanctions in NCLB is that states may take over failing schools. And when they get them, what are they supposed to do with them? I wish there were an example of a successful state takeover. I don’t know of any.

So, yes, we agree that democracy matters. It matters in the management of public schools and it matters in the workplace. And I am drawn to your comment that a well-educated person is someone with the disposition and tools “to exercise, defend and revise our judgments about an incompletely known world.” When people take a stand and resolutely refuse to listen to counter-arguments or to contrary evidence, then either the subject is religion or the person is clinging to ideology.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Diane,

Agreed. Most people's ideas—good and bad—are adapted by others in ways that would surprise the original author. Sometimes the "followers" have improved on the original, but it hurts when they have massacred it. Which is another way of agreeing with you that Dewey's ideas have not always led where he hoped they would. Ditto for Jean Piaget, from whom American educators borrowed the idea of cognitive "stages" and tried to figure out how to rush children onto the "next stage" faster. Sometimes the original idea is partially to blame—clearly containing the seeds of its own distortion. In John Dewey's case, given the times and context, much that survived would have dismayed him. Poor Karl Marx if he were able to see how Stalin twisted his words or imagine Christ's dismay over the legacy of much of Christianity. And so on.

On a rather smaller and humbler scale, the role I've played in both pushing and implementing the idea of school choice and small schools sometimes haunts me. Choice has been co-opted by those who want to privatize public education and as a means for resegregating by class, race, "talent" or "future vocations". Small schools, for some reformer, just means creating more manageable sub-divisions in order, I sometimes suspect, to make monitoring for compliance easier. It's far harder to be unnoticed—for good and bad—in a large school. But the story is not over, and both of these concepts may yet be turned around to represent reform practices we both like.

In today's culture, the closer our children get to adulthood the fewer adults they know well, and the less they experience the adult world first hand. We have largely abandoned the young to a peer and media culture that is built round only one value system: the profit motive. (I notice one of our respondents thinks this is precisely what's missing from public school—the profit motive.) I wanted small schools to reconnect strong adults with would-be strong kids. Only powerful schools in which adult life is robust and visible to the young can create the kind of democratic culture we need. The adults include the staff of the school, of course, and the families of the students, and others in the larger community—face to face, not solely through virtual realities.

Our schools are not great at valuing intellectually thoughtful adults, inclined to take their ideas seriously, eager to exchange ideas and know-how with others, and deeply dedicated to include the next generation in such activities. Dedication alone would never be enough, of course—because there is more to bridging cultures than the sheer desire to do so. But it's a starting point. Then we need to be open to the possibility that those we teach confront the information and ideas we want to pass on with a mindset of their own, experiences that lead them to translate our powerful ideas into their own powerful ideas. The kind of mutual respect between teacher and learner and the "x" that both are focused on is hard to come by under the best of circumstances. Most of the time, in the schools we have, the teacher's focus and the kids' are entirely disconnected.

Rereading the work of physicist and science educator David Hawkins on the "thee, thou and it" of schooling is well worth doing. The "it" is what you and I, Diane, often disagree about. I hope those disagreements can be precisely the stuff that faculties and school boards feel free—maybe required—to grapple with. I'm perhaps less optimistic than you are that they will resist the temptation to turn judgment over to others—objective instruments or remote curriculum experts. They are, for perfectly good reasons, more likely to stick with conventional practice than to use their freedom too adventurously.

Judgment is at the heart of intelligence, and must be honored at every point along the way. It's not a bad word. We both want kids to experience adults proud to make judgments—whether they are doctors, lawyers, athletes, artists, teachers, politicians, or citizens—within a community prepared to confront such judgments critically. One nice definition of being well-educated is having the disposition and tools to exercise, defend and revise our judgments about an incompletely known world.

There are, as you point out, serious trade-offs involved. "The people" are not to be romanticized. But by thinning the liveliness of democratic life—in school and out—to the most trivial of decisions, reserving the important stuff for experts, we make it hard to excite kids (or citizens) about joining such a culture. It becomes a "student government" charade.

Accountability is at the crux of democracy—maybe even another word for it. Voting is, of course, one such act of accountability. So is arguing, speaking out, and participating in a range of local decision-making bodies. If this isn't practiced in our schools, where do we imagine it will be learned?

The bills that are likely to come before Congress in the immediate future are, I agree Diane, likely to be scary. NCLB—all 1000-plus pages—wasn't read by anyone who voted for it last time, surely not in its entirety. Even "War and Peace" can't be read overnight, and Tolstoy was a livelier writer than the authors of NCLB. Probably the main thing the Feds can do well is provide the funds needed for schooling and teacher education to create a leveler playing field and information that we can more or less respect and trust. The fewer direct consequences there are—rewards or punishments—associated with such data collection the greater the likelihood that it will be honest. We need less of the Texas "miracle" and Enron-style data, and more of the "academic" type. Aha, you see, I finally found a positive use for that word!

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 7:15 AM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend