Ealier this month, I had the honor of attending a lecture by Alfie Kohn at the MCTE Fall 2006 conference in Lansing. Hands down, he is one of the most impassioned, intelligent, and interesting speakers I have ever encountered throughout my high school and college career.
The main point of his lecutre revolved around the "Tougher Standards Movement", and more importantly, what's wrong with it. During his lecture, Kohn made five key points against standardized testing:
Five Fatal Flaws
1. It gets motivation wrong. Most talk of standards assumes that students ought to be thinking constantly about improving their performance. This single-minded concern with results turns out to be remarkably simplistic. The assumption that achievement is all that counts overlooks a substantial body of psychological research suggesting that a focus on how well one is doing is very different from a focus on WHAT one is doing. Moreover, a preoccupation with performance often undermines interest in learning, quality of learning, and a desire to be challenged.
2. It gets pedagogy wrong. The Tougher Standards contingent is big on back-to-basics, and, more generally, the sort of instruction that treats kids as though they were inert objects, that prepares a concoction called "basic skills" or "core knowledge" and then tries to pour it down their throats. State standards documents, in particular, typically contain long lists of specific facts and skills that all students in a given grade level are expected to master. This is a model that might be described as outdated were it not for the fact that, frankly, there never was a time when it worked all that well. Modern cognitive science just explains more systematically why it has always come up short.
3. It gets evaluation wrong. In practice, "excellence," "higher standards," and "raising the bar" all refer to scores on standardized tests, many of them multiple-choice, norm-referenced, and otherwise flawed. Indeed, much of the discussion about education today is arrested at the level of "Test scores are low; make them go up." All the limits of, and problems with, such testing amount to a serious indictment of the version of school reform that relies on these tests.
4. It gets school reform wrong. Proponents of Tougher Standards have a proclivity for trying to coerce improvement by specifying exactly what must be taught and learned - that is, by mandating a particular kind of education. There is good reason to doubt that the way one changes schooling is simply by demanding that teachers and students do things differently. "Accountability" usually turns out to be a code for tighter control over what happens in classrooms by people who are not in classrooms - and it has approximately the same effect on learning that a noose has on breathing.
5. It gets improvement wrong. Weaving its way through all these ideas is an implicit assumption about "rigor" and "challenge" - namely, that harder is always better. The reductive (and really rather silly) idea that tests, texts, and teachers can all be judged on the single criterion of difficulty level lurks behind complaints about "dumbing down" education and strident calls to "raise the bar." Its first cousin is the idea that if something isn't working very well -- say, requiring students to do homework of dubious value -- then insisting on more of the same will surely solve the problem. As Harvey Daniels puts it, the dominant philosophy of fixing schools today consists of saying, in effect, that "what we're doing is OK, we just need to do it harder, longer, stronger, louder, meaner, and we'll have a better country."
http://www.alfiekohn.org/standards/rationale.htm
In addition to the five points stated above that Kohn made throughout his lecture, he also made some interesting points about the Michigan MEAP test, and state-wide standards:
- "Great writing is messy - the greater the writing, the messier it is. Michigan standards are oderly."
- "Higher MEAP scores are not always meaningless, sometimes they're a bad sign."
- "The MEAP measures what matters least - it can over and underestimate student's abilities."
