I just read an interview with educator Alfie Kohn that I highly recommend. In one short interview, he clearly and logically explains the fundamental problems with the approach to public education taken not only by the Republican administration responsible for No Child Left Behind, but also continued by Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. If you care about your children’s schools but haven’t really paid much attention to what’s happening, this interview lays it all out very clearly.
Yearly standardized testing is a waste of our money and a stress on our children. As Kohn explains, “any test that’s standardized — one-size-fits-all, created and imposed by distant authorities — is inauthentic and is likely to measure what matters least.”
Yearly standardized testing actually has the opposite of the intended effect: “The more you reward people for doing something (or threaten them for not doing it), the less interest they tend to have in whatever they were made to do.”
Merit pay (as New York City found in a recent study) has no merit: “So how should we reward teachers? We shouldn’t. They’re not pets. Rather, teachers should be paid well, freed from misguided mandates, treated with respect, and provided with the support they need to help their students become increasingly proficient and enthusiastic learners.”
But shouldn’t we trust the experts who have risen to the top of their field? As Kohn points out, they aren’t experts from the world of education. The people making decisions for our kids are motivated by corporate profits, not serious study of learning and genuine interest in having a well-educated population: “Arne Duncan knows nothing about the nuances of assessment and he’s surrounded by Gates Foundation people and others who are at the heart of the corporate “reform” movement that has actively supported the ultra-high-stakes use of lousy tests.”
What can we do?
Well, I’m guessing that you, like me, aren’t going to be in Washington tomorrow for the big Save Our Schools march. But you can do your part to make it clear that you want your child’s school to educate, not teach to the test. You can vote with your feet (and the tax dollars that follow you) by leaving a district school that focuses on testing over learning. You can write to your representatives to let them know that parents don’t see their kids becoming more educated as test scores rise — we see them more stressed out, less creative, more focused on narrow achievement instead of broad understanding and skills.
Here’s Kohn again, reminding you that education doesn’t have to be this way:
We are living through what future historians will surely describe as one of the darkest eras in American education — a time when teachers, as well as the very idea of democratic public education, came under attack; when carrots and sticks tied to results on terrible tests were sold to the public as bold “reform”; when politicians who understand nothing about learning relied uncritically on corporate models and metaphors to set education policy; when the goal of schooling was as misconceived as the methods, framed not in terms of what children need but in terms of “global competitiveness” — that is, how U.S. corporations can triumph over their counterparts in other countries.
There will come a time when people will look back at this era and ask, “How the hell could they have let this happen?” By participating in Saturday’s march, by speaking out in our communities, we’re saying that we need to act before we lose an entire generation to this insanity. The corporate-style school reformers don’t have research or logic on their side. All they have is the power to impose their ignorance with the force of law. To challenge their power, therefore, means we need to organize. We must make sure that the conversation about the how’s and why’s of education is driven by educators.
In short, we have to take back our schools.
