December 2009 Archives

In October I posted an interview with Dr. J Myron Atkin about how educational research is usually trumped by political considerations. I first met Dr. Atkin about eight years ago when I joined the NSF-funded CAPITAL Project (Classroom Assessment Project to Improve Teaching And Learning). As I mentioned in my post earlier this week, this project exposed me to the latest research on formative assessment, and inspired me to incorporate many new strategies into my practice.

In Monday's post, I raised questions about how the research supporting formative assessment is now being used to justify highly prescriptive checklists and mini-tests for teachers to use -- geared towards preparing students for summative standardized tests. This seems to be at odds with the spirit of the original research that inspired the approach in the first place. I shared my post with Dr. Atkin, and he offers us the following commentary.

Dr. Atkin writes:
The impressive attention that formative assessment is receiving in today's schools stems from seminal work by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam in the late 1990s. They systematically reviewed the research literature and found 580 reports or chapters in more than 160 journals that bear on the results of formative assessment. They concluded that few, if any, classroom interventions improve student learning as much.

They also have been very clear about exactly what formative assessment is: working with a student, or a group of students, to develop a course of action that helps bridge the gap between current student knowledge and the desired educational goal. Providing feedback that is usable, detailed, and often individualized is at the heart of this kind of assessment. Formative assessment, so defined, is a pivotal element of everyday classroom teaching. It occurs throughout the school day. It requires collaborative involvement of both teacher and student. And it isn't something purchased from a vendor that can be used in an identical fashion anywhere, like an instruction book or a cooking recipe.

Regrettably, the testing companies have hijacked the formative label and are marketing it toward ends that are the polar opposite of what the research highlights as so powerful in student learning. Much of what the companies are marketing as formative assessment consists of prescribed mini-tests inserted at specified points in the curriculum for the purpose of giving students practice for the standardized examinations at the end of the year. In much too facile a fashion, it separates assessment from teaching and learning instead of integrating all three.

One-size-fits-all, large-scale, end-of-year summative testing has already weakened education by reducing the curriculum to outcomes that can be assessed by relatively inexpensive tests using multiple-choice and other short-answer questions. We are now seeing a solidification of that influence as testing companies aggressively promote infusion of the entire curriculum with scores of mini-tests -- under the guise of promoting formative assessment. Preparing for the big tests by having the students take many little ones of the same kind may be one way to teach, but it isn't formative assessment.

The key benefits of formative assessment emphasized in the research literature are associated with changes in the classroom that result when teachers and students collaborate closely in examining the quality of student work. What does quality look like? What might the student do to improve school work to bring it to a higher quality than it is right now? This integration of teaching, learning, and assessment is complex work, but potent. It takes time and effort: hours, days, weeks, and months - not the periodic 15 or 20 minutes needed to respond to questions purchased from a remote "item bank" developed by the testing companies to foreshadow the final examination. Reporting mini-test scores to the students and even discussing common incorrect answers has little relationship to the type of feedback studied by Black and Wiliam that produced such large gains in achievement.

Standardized testing has a place in a comprehensive system of assessment, but not if it saturates the curriculum in ways that weaken teaching and learning, and not if it is directed primarily toward preparation for tests that are known to have serious limitations of scope and depth. The saddest element for students, teachers, parents, and the general public is that we know better.

Dr. J Myron Atkin is a professor (emeritus) of education at Stanford University.

What do you think? How are you seeing formative assessment used in your school? Is this helping our students?

image by J Myron Atkin

Posted by Anthony Cody at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

There is a great deal of educational research that now points to the value of formative assessment. This wave began about a dozen years ago, with the publication of an influential paper by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam, entitled "Inside the Black Box, Raising Standards through Classroom Assessment." (downloadable here) Black and Wiliam provided strong evidence that when teachers assess student performance routinely as instruction unfolds, this information can be used to provide timely and specific feedback to students, which has a powerful impact on learning. It can also be used to inform instruction, so that teachers know when concepts have been missed or grasped, and what misconceptions may have arisen. These practices are known as formative assessment, and have become a part of most modern curricula and school improvement efforts.

I learned about this research eight years ago, when I was part of the NSF-funded CAPITAL Project (Classroom Assessment Project to Improve Teaching And Learning), led by Dr. J Myron Atkin. Dr. Atkin's hypothesis was that assessment practices flowed from deeply held teacher beliefs. He wanted to see how these practices might change when teachers received new information about more effective models of assessment. We read the research of Black and Wiliam, and even spent some time meeting with them as they described their work and how we might apply it in our classrooms.

Over the next several years I actively experimented with giving more feedback to my students, using rubrics, models of student work, and having students assess their own work as well as that of their peers. This really transformed my teaching. I began to see the value of having a clear set of goals in mind when I began a unit. I could see how much more the students learned when I was clear about these goals, and helped them with these various strategies. I felt empowered because I had been actively engaged in a process that made this work for me, with my particular philosophy and style of teaching.

So if you ask me "does formative assessment work?" I would reply "yes, it does."

But there is a way that good ideas can get turned into bureaucratic nightmares.

My friend teacherken over at Daily Kos alerted me to this story about a new formative assessment system being implemented in Baltimore County, Maryland. The article says:

Baltimore County school administrators have ordered all teachers to begin using a grading system next month that will require them to judge whether each of their students has mastered more than 100 specific skills.

This system is designed to show if students have achieved "mastery" on the skills contained in state standards. The article continues:

It shows that elementary school teachers, who often have classes of up to 25 students, will have to judge each of their students on whether they have mastered more than a hundred skills in as many subjects as they teach. In high schools, where some teachers can have more than 100 students, the task will be no less complicated, teachers say.

Over the course of a year, many teachers would have to make as many as 10,000 marks indicating whether a child had learned a task. For instance, a third-grade teacher would have to determine whether a child has dozens of skills, including the ability to "apply phonics skills to decode words with hard and soft consonants and 2-letter initial consonant blends." And in middle school math, one of the skills listed says, "analyze and describe non-linear functions using the vocabulary of appearance."

The fundamental idea behind formative assessment is that a teacher should be actively monitoring student learning in many ways, on all the important dimensions that we are trying to teach. A conscientious and skilled teacher can do this by a variety of formal and informal assessment practices. We can use exit slips to check for understanding. We can walk around the classroom as students work and observe who is struggling to complete an assignment. We can review student work, and we can have students review the work of their peers. The essence of this is empowering the teacher and elevating her importance as an active participant in the learning process.

But what happens if we do not trust teachers to do this work skillfully and with integrity? Then we create checklists to make sure they are doing every discreet step. We mandate the use of these forms, and require teachers to do thousands of assessments a year. And what should be a powerful tool in the hands of effective teachers can become a row of boxes to be filled in.

I have not used the Baltimore County system, so I would love to hear from anyone who has used it, or similar record-keeping systems.

What do you think of the Baltimore County program? Have you used formative assessment strategies effectively? Have you used anything like the Baltimore County system?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The fight over health care is not over yet, but this week the US Senate approved its version of reform, and it appears the bills will continue to move forward in the coming weeks.

This process has me thinking about another set of national reforms that may be on the Senate's agenda before long - the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind. Teachers seem nearly unanimous in our disapproval of the way NCLB has narrowed the curriculum, undermined good teaching and heightened inequities in our schools. But the American people were in favor of a public option in health care by a wide margin, and so far that has meant less than the hundreds of lobbyists, and the $600 million the insurance industry spent to make sure their interests were served.

Education has become big business. Some corporations, like the publishers and creators of standardized tests, have huge profits at stake in the direction taken by educational reform. When all education reform depends on more and more tests, given at every level and with ever-increasing frequency and specificity, there are billions of dollars to be made. The industry has allies and lobbyists to support this trend.

Another big set of players are the corporate education philanthropists. Although they are not monolithic, these entrepreneurs tend to support education reform with a particular slant towards their values.

The advocates I have described above are very clear about their priorities, and are largely aligned with one another. They tend to support:
• the elimination of teacher tenure
• teacher pay and evaluations tied to student test scores
• Aggressive expansion of charter schools
• National standards and tests aligned to those standards (see the Gates Foundation's recent grant of $1 million to the national PTA to generate support for national standards).
• Extension of the punitive aspects of NCLB (see Duncan's plan to target the bottom 5000 schools).

These are not the priorities of most teachers, and in fact will move us further down the path of No Child Left Behind. Teachers thought we had elected an advocate in Barack Obama. His campaign materials spoke of de-emphasizing test scores and making sure struggling schools were supported rather than punished. But his Secretary of Education has done little to bring this vision to life, and instead we are seeing more emphasis on test scores and the expansion of charter schools as the keys to reform.

We still hope that President Obama will wake up and realize he has overlooked the wisdom of a core constituency. But we need to do more than just hope. We need to act.

What do we have going for us?

We have more than six million teachers!

Two thirds of us belong to two of the largest unions in the nation, the NEA and the AFT.

We have learned a tremendous amount about education reform over the past decade, and we have clear, well-informed perspectives about how to improve schools.

We have solid allies in parents who have seen how schools have become obsessed with test scores to the detriment of real learning.

We have potentially powerful allies in our students, who are likewise becoming aware that they are being systematically miseducated as a result of current policies.

I stated what I see on the agenda of the well-financed "education reform" movement that has brought us NCLB, Race to the Top, and soon, national standards. We need to do more than simply react to their agenda. We need to offer a vision of our own! What should we, as teachers, place on our agenda?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 8:31 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The Teachers' Letters to Obama project has tapped into the spirit of teachers across the country. Letters continue to come in, and today I share this one. This brief letter does not cite facts or figures to make its case, but it is powerful nonetheless. Please read, and reflect, and respond.

Dear President Obama,
I became an elementary teacher over 20 years ago to change the world. I was excited about imparting knowledge to children and to help them learn how to think, reason, cooperate, and creatively and non-violently solve problems.

Teaching is an art. And knowing how to reach an individual class or much less, an individual child cannot be quantified.

While standards are important as guidelines, the quality of educating of a whole person is immeasurable. Recently, I have found myself so obsessed with bringing my test scores up in the areas of math, reading, and science - the subjects in which my fourth graders are being tested, that I feel that so much about the art of my teaching is being lost.

A few weeks ago, I received an e-mail from a student I taught in a Philadelphia inner city 6th grade class eight years ago. She had lived in very difficult circumstances. This is a portion of the message: "...my mom is OK to (sic), just try to get by these ruff (sic) times together but still looking on the bright side of things. Wow i am still shock that i found you, i have you know i never gave up writing poetry. I have note books full of them. I remember you where the one that introduced to the world of poetry. I am glad i met you ms.Leff you are my favorite teacher, i still even remember the poem you recited to me it was by Langston Hughes i believe the poem is called dreamers
'Bring me all your dreams, you dreamers, bring me all your heart melodies for i will wrap them in a blue cloud clothe away from the two ruff (sic) fingers of the earth.' "

I am so proud that I affected this young woman's life so profoundly. This letter reflects the essence of why I teach. I can barely imagine getting a letter from a student in eight years telling me they will never forget getting a proficient grade on a standardized test.

Leslie Schwartz Leff

What do you think? How does this compare with your experience? Why did you choose to teach? Are you still fulfilling your own vision of your work as a teacher?

(Note: the entire compilation of letters contributed thus far can be downloaded here.)

Posted by Anthony Cody at 2:51 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The current push for national standards has teachers pulled in different directions. Standards can be useful tools for classroom teachers. We appreciate having a clear set of expectations for our students, and it helps us to work with colleagues when we are all aligned towards the same goals.

But eight years of No Child Left Behind has left many of us deeply wary of the intrusion of reform schemes into our classrooms. And the promise of national standards is usually linked to a case for national standardized tests that will allow all our classrooms to be compared by the same tests.

In the letters that I have been collecting to submit to President Obama and Secretary Duncan, (now downloadable here) the most often expressed and deeply held belief is that we are overemphasizing the importance of test scores, and this is having a terrible effect on our students. But we do not seem to have consensus as a profession about the role of national standards, so I would like to offer my own concerns, and invite some more dialogue.

First of all, here in California, many of our standards have been "raised" so that students in the third grade are supposed to learn about the Periodic Table of Elements, and math content has been pushed downwards so that younger students are expected to learn more. I fear that national standards will spread this trend across the country, because the National Governors' Association has promised the new standards will be at least as "rigorous" as current state standards.

Second, the committee that wrote the draft standards had no classroom teachers, and was dominated by people who work for the big test publishers. The current working groups include some teachers, but I remain concerned about how well teachers are represented in this process. (See a blog entry I posted on this subject back in July of this year.)

Third: The emphasis seems to be to prepare students for college entrance exams. Only a third of our students graduate from college, so why should we build a system that assumes its only purpose is college preparation?

Fourth: The real purpose of national standards is to provide the basis for national standardized tests. National standards seem likely to intensify all the pressure we currently face to prepare students to take tests by allowing every student in the nation to be compared on the same test.

Fifth: We have heard rhetoric about national competitiveness for decades. In 1983 we were warned by the "Nation At Risk" report that our country was going to be overtaken by foreign competitors such as the Japanese. Then we had two decades of economic growth in the US, while the Japanese economy went completely stagnant. As Yong Zhao has pointed out, the strength of our economy and our culture is our creativity and diversity. Trying to make everyone meet the same standard is a dead end culturally and economically. (note: an excellent new interview with Yong Zhao on this subject in PDK can be downloaded here for free.)

What do you think? Will national standards help us teach better? Or will they make the tests even more pervasive in our schools?

Update: In addition to posting an interesting comment below, Marsha Ratzel has posted a blog entry at her Reflections of a Techie blog, responding to this issue.

Creative Commons images by purplbutrfly, visual dichotomy, and woodleywonderworks

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:24 AM | Permalink | 3 Comments | Recommend

The most powerful justification for the continuation of the test-centered reform model of No Child Left Behind has been the claim that it is all about bringing up the less fortunate. From the start, NCLB was sold on the claim that it would "shine a light" on those who had been left behind. Unfortunately, it has delivered an extended era of darkness to the lowest performing schools, as is evidenced by the letter I shared a week ago, and the one below, from a teacher in one of California's lowest performing middle schools.

The Teachers' Letters to Obama project continues to gather steam, thanks to the eloquent testimony of leaders like Kathie Marshall, who gave me permission to share her words here:

President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan:
I am hoping that you are reading my Letter to Obama forwarded by my colleague, Anthony Cody, because that will mean that you have read all of these letters. You will note, as Anthony did, that teachers from across the nation feel a remarkable sense of consensus on the issues. We're not talking about employment security, teacher working conditions, or compensation. We're talking about our kids, and how NCLB and current reform directions threaten education.

I have been an educator since 1970 in a wide variety of grade levels and both public and private schools. In every situation my students were tested externally in some fashion. As a new Los Angeles USD teacher, my students in South Central Los Angeles moved from the bottom third to the middle third. When I taught sixth graders preparing for private junior highs, students went from the 60th percentile to the 90th or higher on a regular basis, allowing them access to the most exclusive private junior highs in Los Angeles.

When I returned to LAUSD, my students in a low-performing middle school raised their SAT and other test scores remarkably. Then I made a six-year decision to become a literacy coach at one of California's lowest performing middle schools. I watched teacher morale lessen with each "drop of the shoe" as the district began its own reform, adding more and more top-down curricular decisions and wresting control of the classroom from teachers' hands.

In September, 2008, I returned to the classroom because I could never shake my love of working with my own students. Although that "dastardly" union tenure meant I could select the best and brightest classes, I opted to teach a group of intervention reading students who most needed help. All year I was stuck with a scripted curriculum that was mind-numbingly deadly, even though some years ago I had developed my own reading intervention curriculum based on service learning that was highly successful. I also taught a group of sixth graders who ranged from FBB to Advanced.

What have I learned since my return to the classroom after six years out?
1) My general ed students are far different than the ones I had six or more years ago. They mostly can't stand school. Although they are compliant, there is little "spark" in their eyes when I present lessons that for years brought me comments from students such as "You're the only reason I come to school!" My students are primarily resistant to learning. They can read, yes, but mostly as word-callers. If I try to deepen their thinking, they freeze. In many ways it has been a disappointing return for me; I did not expect such drastic change in students' attitudes and work ethics. I continue to plug away and try my best to reach my students and turn around these attitudes.

2) When I got my students' standardized test scores in September, I was horrified to see that in my regular class of 25 students, 14 had dropped a band on the CST. Only one has gone up a band. In my intervention group, one student jumped two bands, three others one band, but the majority stayed "far below basic.". THIS was the result of my efforts? I began to agonize over what had gone wrong. After all, even in my first year of teaching in 1970 I had been identified as a successful teacher (via test scores and other measures), and I had taught for many years in very diverse conditions. What had gone wrong?

3) After much reflection, the only thing I could identify was that I had not properly prepared my students for multiple choice tests. For you see, for decades I have taught students through discussion, writing, project-based assessments, and creative and intellectual thought. In all honesty, I continued to downplay multiple choice tests because as a student myself, I had always known that multiple choice tests do not test understanding. I had never done as well on multiple choice tests as I did on other types of assessments. I was valedictorian of my high school class and a National Merit Honoree, but when I went to college, I continued to struggle wth multiple choice tests. Give me an essay, and I can show you what I know. Give me a multiple choice test, and maybe I'll get an A--but maybe I'll get a C. The learning is the same; the assessment is the difference.

4) So this year I am working additional time at home to develop standards-based assessments, and I'm bringing in test preparation materials, all in the hopes of raising my students' CST scores. I'm not teaching them more effectively; I'm doing more test preparation.

Is this really reform, I ask? Is it more engaging for my at-risk students? I am teaching some of the lowest performing, special needs students in one of the lowest performing middle schools in California. My school is a QEIA school, one of nearly 500 schools identified as the worst performing in the state. I am trying to revive enthusiasm for school and develop confidence in learning for students who have struggled in school for years. And my primary addition to my practice this year is more multiple choice tests!? Is this really the reform you want in our schools? Wouldn't you rather sit down with teachers who have been successful for years in a wide variety of circumstances to try to identify the intangibles that promote student learning and clearly are not identified in high-stakes, multiple-choice tests?

Why are teachers left out of reform? How in the world did we become the scapegoats of education? How do you expect to attract the best and brightest of our young people to become teachers when teacher empowerment and morale has never been lower, and when the focus is on multiple choice tests, which even as a high schooler I could see were a vastly inadequate measure of learning?

Kathie Marshall
Member, Teacher Leaders Network
Pacoima, California

What do you think about Kathie Marshall's questions? How does her experience compare with yours?

Note: The entire batch of 100 letters submitted thus far can now be downloaded here.

image by Kathie Marshall

Posted by Anthony Cody at 9:40 AM | Permalink | 3 Comments | Recommend

Yesterday I attended a screening of a new film created by a Bay Area parent who discovered that her own children were suffering psychological and physical damage due to the tremendous stresses our competitive school culture was creating. Race to Nowhere is now being screened for audiences of students, parents and educators, and will go into wider release early next year.

The metaphor of a race is so often used in discussing education, we do not even stop to think about the implications. This film gives voice to our students, so seldom heard from in the clamor about their education. One said, "School is just so much pressure. Every day I would wake up dreading it." Another said "I would spend six hours a night on my homework." But they agreed that they were not learning deeply. They are learning to answer questions on tests, learning to cram information into their heads, learning to cheat so they can get the all-important grade that will get them into the best college.

It is all a race. And races have winners and losers.

The parents, it is clear, are motivated by great fear. They are seeing that the middle class in America is shrinking, and the standard of living is dropping. They believe that if their children are not in the top tenth, they may not be as successful as they were. Many parents have bought into the American equation of wealth with status and thus happiness, and see that the next generation is going to have a rougher time achieving this dream. So the pressure is on from an early age, and students are coached to be performers.

The documentary reveals the tremendous cost of this pressure. Children are losing their childhoods. They have little time to play, or relax, and research has shown how valuable unstructured play is in building social skills and imagination. They are constantly seeking to please someone else - a parent, a teacher, a coach - and they lose sight of their intrinsic motivation. Why are they doing all of this? What are they passionate about? This is a question that is deferred until after the test, after admittance to college, after graduation, after they have a job. But many children wind up feeling empty, even suicidal, when they contemplate the years of drudgery that awaits them, and cannot even see the point.

We also are brought into schools in Oakland, where teachers struggle against a testing regime that systematically devalues the culture and learning styles of their students. I strongly identified with a teacher there who shared her frustration with the constant pressure to prepare students to take tests.

But we are shown alternatives as well. The Blue School in Manhattan was started by a member of The Blue Man group, a highly creative dance troupe. This private school's mission is "to cultivate creative, joyful and compassionate inquirers who use courageous and innovative thinking to build a harmonious and sustainable world." Students there are given space to be children. The goal is to build on their innate curiosity and creativity, and by nurturing that, allow the children to develop into naturally inquisitive and passionate learners. It is clear that the ability to solve problems, think critically, and to collaborate with others are the core skills of the 21st century. These are the skills embedded in the pedagogy at the Blue School, and in approaches such as Project-Based Learning, inquiry-based science, and many others.

I am sorry to say I do not believe the Blue School approach would succeed in the public school system today. Our current system demands that all students be proficient on standardized tests, and this is difficult even with intensive test preparation - and utterly impossible following a more wholistic approach such as the Blue School's.

This film is an emotional experience. It is a huge wake-up call to parents, educators, and to our children. As one parent says, "We all have to get off this treadmill together." The film calls us to question so much in our current system, and it makes it clear this is not just about test preparation. It is all connected to how we define success in our society.

Lastly, and most importantly, the documentary is a call to action. It was interesting that in speaking with the director, Vicki Abeles, afterwards, she suggested that parents need to reach out to teachers to get their support in this effort. I have been thinking that as teachers, we need the support of parents to change our direction. There is clearly a synergy possible here, an awakening that we can pull together into a real movement for change in our schools. Parents, students, educators - we are all much more closely allied than we have realized. And we are all being abused by the rules of this "race."

Please visit the Race to Nowhere web site , view the trailer, and sign the petition there. If you are interested in engaging your school/parent community in discussion around these issues, I would highly recommend a screening of this film. The creators of the film have discussion guides, and recent screenings are leading to heartfelt discussions in schools about the need to examine homework practices, the role of AP courses, and ways to shift school cultures in a healthier direction.

What do you think? Are our students in a race to nowhere? Can we build a common cause with parents and students?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:40 AM | Permalink | 5 Comments | Recommend

Our Earth is in crisis. Though some prefer to close their eyes and plug their ears, those of us willing to look are observing the greatest mass extinction of species the Earth has seen for millions of years. We are exhausting the Earth's resources at a fast rate, and our emissions threaten to wreak havoc with global climate and weather.

What has driven us here? And what is it about our economic system that makes it so hard to shift our course even slightly? It feels as if we are on a train heading down a track and the engineer's only instruction is to go as fast as you can.

The central problem is that we have an economic system that has a single bottom line. All economic activity has as its exclusive goal the generation of monetary profit. No other values are allowed to intrude. This greatly simplifies the world of business, and allows people who work there great clarity of purpose. It is easy to determine the success and failure of a venture. Just tell me how much money you made.

If I choose to open a donut shop, my success will be judged by how much I sell. The fact that the money was made by selling a product that makes people unhealthily obese is not germane. We know that society will eventually pay for obesity through higher health care costs, but when I seek out a small business loan to get started, no lender is going to factor that into the lending equation. All that matters is my profitability.

My impact on the environment might be a minor moral concern to me, but that too is an "externality," a spillover effect not directly connected to the business at hand. We have a huge problem in that we have yet to figure out a way to strongly connect business activities to the sometimes very negative impacts they may have on the world, or on the humans and other species that live here. This problem has gotten so severe that it actually threatens our stable existence on this planet. We can see our species struggling to try to respond, but our economic system, with its simplistic rules, makes this very difficult to do.

Our schools have traditionally been allowed a bit more latitude in measuring our work. In decades past our society recognized that there were a variety of goals for the educational system. We were expected to train children to be good citizens in our democratic system, so we taught citizenship, and students elected class officers. We wanted children to be healthy, so we taught them about nutrition and gave them exercise in PE class. We wanted them to be able to find a job, so they had the option of taking classes that taught useful skills. We wanted them to get along with others, so they learned to cooperate and work in groups.

But business people saw a shocking flaw in our system. There was no bottom line. Unlike a business, schools had no balance sheet at the end of the year - no "metrics," no way to directly compare one school to another. No way to tell which school was a good return on our investment, and which was wasting the public's money.

Thus was born the concept of "A Nation at Risk" and ultimately a profit-minded "accountability movement." Where before we had fuzzy values and no ability to measure success, now we have clear standards and, most important of all, a bottom line. Just as in business, we have a way to see if our efforts have yielded the desired result.

And just as in business we have created a system in which there are externalities that must be disregarded for the sake of creating an uncluttered balance sheet.

Our profits are measured in test scores pure and simple. Just as our business balance sheets exclude trees cut down, or air polluted, our test score results exclude:

Creative and critical thinking

The mental health or happiness of a child

A sense of humor

A strong connection between the life of the student and what they are learning

Physical health

An awareness of the student's relationship to the democratic society in which he or she lives.

Compassion for others

The ability to cooperate and collaborate as part of a team

The ability to ask really great questions

A sense of beauty and harmony

All of these things have become externalities in our public schools. And with the narrow emphasis on reading and math in No Child Left Behind, even academic subjects like science and history have become external to the bottom line, and as a result have been marginalized in many schools.

We are approaching a paradigm shift in human thought and behavior. Our planet cannot sustain a system that defines its own basic needs as "externalities." Change will come because change must come - and the sooner, the better for all of us. When revolutions of this sort approach, defenders become desperate and seek hegemony for their model so that its flaws can be concealed and they can remain secure in its illusion of stability.

But it will not work. As a culture and a species, we have too many problems that cannot be solved by a one-dimensional view of profit and loss. Our society is not in a Race to the Top, but a race for survival. No Child Left Behind was an attempt to enforce these failed values on our schools, but as is evidenced by the outpouring of teacher sentiment in the recent Teachers' Letters to Obama project, it has failed.

Our students and parents continue to bring their own hopes and ideals to school, and insist that they count. As teachers, our personal ethics and values are not external to school - they are the reason we choose to teach. We must not trade our judgment and our students' fundamental human needs for a single-minded focus on test scores, any more than we should allow life on our planet to continue to suffer from a single-minded focus on profit.

What do you think?
Creative Commons image by aussiegall

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:59 AM | Permalink | 8 Comments | Recommend