Everywhere I turn recently, education is under siege. Wisconsin teachers are rioting due to assaults on their pensions and collective bargaining rights. Waiting For Superman shines a spotlight on the charter movement amid howls of protest from public school defenders. President Obama’s Race to the Top program seeks to reform education through monetary incentives at the state level, but is decried as overly punitive. The discussion is hard-charging and emotional. It’s difficult to seek a deeper understanding of what’s best for children in this context.
Alfie Kohn’s recent column in Education Week argues that school reformers overemphasize basic skills in their work with high poverty students and use deleterious pedagogy. His argument hinges on the assumption that disjointed skills-based instruction is undermining the full potential and human agency of our poorest students. Kohn argues that in our eagerness to raise the bar for poor students we fail to present coherent, relevant, engaging curriculum that has the power to truly transform a child’s life prospects. Interestingly, Kohn writes that, “at its core…school reform is not intended to promote thinking.” Kohn appears primarily worried that in our eagerness to close the achievement gap, we are creating a more slippery and persistent learning gap between rich and poor.
I believe I understand the spirit of Kohn’s essay, and it deeply resonates with my educational philosophy, but I find his argument stops short of a solution that will create equity for all children. As a student teacher in one of Deborah Meier’s schools in New York City I witnessed the soft prejudice that comes from centering too much of the educational program around a child’s interests; many children simply fell behind and stopped developing academically. There is a balance between meeting student interests and ensuring they have the skills needed to be academically and socially successful. My experience teaching in central city New Orleans as a Teach For America corps member showed me the importance of clear, skills-based instruction. One of the most common instructional strategies recommended for students with learning difficulties is to teach more explicitly regardless of the child’s socio-economic status. In my work as a second grade teacher at Lincoln Community School, part of the Coalition of Essential Schools, I witness daily the importance of balancing skill development, deep understanding, and student interest.
I believe the school reform movement is only part of the way there to defining student success. Education leaders emphasize data-based decision making and measure our impact through test scores because they are the only yardsticks readily available here and now. More authentic measures are desired, but unfortunately testing is the best instrument we have right now. It is unfortunate that we are making policy decisions solely on the outcomes of tests taken by seven-year-olds, it doesn’t sit right with me. If the purpose of education is to draw forth new types of thinking and create meaning, then how can a test reflect these higher aims?
Testing is a gateway, an entry point, it is not our destination. If we are doing our jobs as educators, our students should sail through these tests and have plenty of time left for a discussion on immigration via the Socratic method. However, tests are a gateway to many opportunities in our society: practicing law, driving a car, and entering college. Learning to take tests well is a skill and an empowerment strategy because it opens many doorways. Some charter school leaders I have spoken with are so focused trying to attain success with tests, that they don’t have space for the other pieces of education that are so essential.
It is a full time job to help students reach these basic gateway skills, and their testing success is easily measurable. To create comprehensive, portfolio-based measures takes years of conversations and norming among educators. My district recently ventured through this process. Trying to reach an agreement about what acceptable non-fiction writing looks like in grades K-6 has taken years for us to attain. Our school is bought into authentic measures of student problem solving in mathematics, but every year I hear my colleagues protest that they haven’t been able to collect all the problem solving pieces necessary from each child. We end up using NECAP test scores instead of math portfolios because the tests are pretty good and the data is right there for us. We’re dealing with a crisis of capacity and implementation, not an ill-meaning reform movement trying to stifle poor children’s higher order thinking.
The reform movement is young and we need thinkers like Alfie Kohn to push us to the next level. Creating a false dichotomy in education reform isn’t helpful. Teachers of all kinds of children need help implementing authentic measures of student performance that can supplement their understanding of student learning. Until we create those authentic measure of student learning I believe we will fail to evolve beyond standardized testing as a measure of educational impact. Let’s drop the finger-pointing and discuss how to bring student learning forward beyond the gateway of skills-based testing.
