Never intended to promote thinking

I've been reading the blog of Steve Miranda, who is a high school teacher in Seattle. He decries the "factory" method of teaching and he and his school work to first take care of the student, then teach to the student's passions. Yeah, that sounds mighty simplistic. Miranda's blog fleshes out those ideas. Alas, I'm not yet sure how to apply them in my own teaching.

In a recent post, Miranda talks about how schools in low-income areas stress drills and discipline. This is the wrong idea he says. The teacher must make it real for the student. He then quotes Alfie Kohn.

Is racism to blame here—or perhaps behaviorism? Or could it be that, at its core, the corporate version of “school reform” was never intended to promote thinking—let alone interest in learning—but merely to improve test results? That pressure is highest in the inner cities, where the scores are lowest. And the pedagogy of poverty can sometimes “work” to raise those scores, which makes everyone happy and inclined to reward those teachers.

Unfortunately, that result is often at the expense of real learning, the sort that more privileged students enjoy, because the tests measure what matters least. Thus, it’s possible for the accountability movement to simultaneously narrow the test-score gap and widen the learning gap.

That emphasis on tests is a big part of the Bush era law No Child Left Behind, which Obama has, alas, endorsed and expanded. Jeff Bryant of Campaign for America's Future wonders if we'll learn from that law's "train wreck."

Yeah, some math scores have gone up, but many teachers have also cut back significantly on other subjects, such as science, art, and social studies. And in spite of some score increases nearly half of our public schools are defined as "failing" under the law.

The big problem is the standards are defective because the standards are based on standardized test score data that is defective.

Michael Winerip of the New York Times wonders about data that can go from "dismal" to "record levels" to "ridiculously inflated" to "statistically significant declines" without any particular reason. Joy Resmovits of Huffington Post notes comparing the test scores of this year's fourth graders to last year's fourth graders is showing the variation in the students, not the difference in the education they've been getting. A US News and World Report notes that schools can lump together regular high school students with those in special ed, night school, and GED programs. "The data" will show a sudden dropout crisis because of the new way of computing it.

We're building public policy on bogus numbers. And the biggest problem of all that data is that learning can't be condensed into "data outputs."