Standardized Tests & Progress Reports ==> Less Challenging, Enriching Curriculum?

This dovetails really nicely with the more general critique I posted of curricular standards a month or so ago:

Getting an F or a D led schools to assign fewer essays, projects

by Elizabeth Green

When the Bloomberg administration announced it would assign every public school a letter grade, based largely on test scores, critics worried the grades would lead to a “drill and kill” approach to teaching. Forced to raise test scores, they said, schools might avoid teaching creativity and problem-solving in favor of focusing on basic skills. New research suggests that the critics worries may have come true — but the researchers don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

Neat Anti-Testing Summary

Quoted from Schools Matter:

As Cal State professor, Art Costa, has said, "What was once educationally significant, but difficult to measure, has been replaced by what is insignificant and easy to measure. So now we test how well we have taught what we do not value."

Comment on Scarsdale and AP

I got a new comment on Scarsdale's decision to ditch the Advanced Placement curriculum that I want to respond to. Here's the comment:

No offense, but this post misses some important points. Scarsdale is one of the most well off school districts in the country.
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I agree, at a very high level of academic achievement, standardized testing winds up inhibiting the very best teachers and students.
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But most schools aren't Scarsdale. These schools are not hitting the ceiling that standardized tests create.

The problems with the AP curriculum and other breadth-intensive standardized tests isn't limited to just the best schools. To see why, think about why we even want students to study, say, history. Here's my short and inexhaustive list:

• It allows them to draw lessons from the past to inform the present
• It develops their critical thinking, analytical, and writing abilities
• It helps them become better citizens
• It develops a foundation of historical and cultural literacy that enhances and informs future learning

Standardized tests and the curricula they impose are inconsistent with these ends. These exams cover an incredible amount of information and offer little opportunity to "do history" in depth. This in depth work is what meets those four objectives.

The problem with standards requiring mastery of hoards of facts is that students spend too much time on remembering and understanding information, and too little time analyzing, evaluating, and creating it. This comic from xkcd illustrates my point:

Most people learn the most and learn most meaningfully when engaged in deep and interesting material, and when they learn by doing I learned more about politics and government from high school debate and mock trial than I did in US History or Government; I learned more about statistical analysis doing my undergraduate research than I did in econometrics or my political science research course.

History as an academic subject is valuable largely because of its applicability to the present. Robert Samuelson reminds us that the seemingly obscure theory of mercantilism informs current international trade behavior; a recently declassified history of the use of nuclear weapons informs our analysis of nuclear deterrence. And Thucydides' history of the Melian dialogue is still probably the best explanation of how states behave in the international system.

Learning history is not nearly as exciting or applicable when kids spend most of their time "remembering" and "understanding" facts. Granted, higher level analysis requres a foundation of knowledge, but the point is that current curricula have these out of proportion.

Many kids come in to high school with literacy skills too low to both (a) remember enough facts to pass the test and (b) engage in more meaningful learning. Student creativity, student led learning, and higher order thinking become the province of rich suburban kids. I think it's a worthwhile trade off to require a narrower breadth of knowledge for the sake of deeper learning.

But suppose that all kids came into high school with Scarsdale-like literacy levels. I know that at least for me, I would have preferred history classes that were student-driven and project-oriented. I would gladly give up 50% of the AP Euro fact-regurgitation requirement for projects allowing me to explore cool parts of history. Its easy to make the argument that this is what electives are for; but if you visit at an at-need school, you'll see that its hard to do this when there's so much institutional pressure to focus on the test.

When opponents of standardized tests come up with a better way to accurately and consistently assess student performance across schools, I'll gladly embrace it. Til then, I'll continue to support AP, SAT, ACT, NCLB, etc. - Dank

I agree we need easily comparable measures of student performance for accountability and resource sharing. I like how the AP Art exam requires a portfolio of student work; I think something comparable should exist for other classes. Standardized assessments can be modified to accommodate the outputs of constructivist learning in an objective fashion. As an idea of what this would look like, think about how theses and creating writing classes are graded. At my school, student project grades are determined by an average of many different teachers' rubric scores.

No Child Left Behind

A recent article in NEA Today highlights some important trends in national test scores and argues that NCLB hasn't made anything better. Take a look at these 2 graphs:



Some thoughts on how this happened:

What happened to make that possible? The War on Poverty? School desegregation? Shrinking class size? Head Start and other new school programs? Maybe all of the above.

Now compare that to education reform in the era of NCLB:

More on Scarsdale's Decision to Cut AP

Education Notes Online has a good post on Scarsdale's move to nix Advanced Placement in favor of a more constructivist, student-centered curriculum.  Ed Notes responds to Joel Klein's position that kids need to develop basic skills before they can enjoy the benefits of an enriched education:

The primary motivation in reading development is a need to read and many kids who struggle don't feel that need. Reading in a world of test prep equals tedium and with the pressure and threats of being left back added, becomes an often joyless exercise.

Build an enriched curriculum and they will come. And improve their reading in surprising ways. Of course, there are often some techinical issues, like poor phonics, that may interfere in the process, but those are relatively easy to solve.

Standardized Testing in America's Best Schools

Conservatives like to say that teachers unions oppose standardized testing because they don't want to accept accountability or set high expectations.  Teachers do this because, like any other trade union, they want to maximize their wages and job security.  Rigorous state standards with tough tests mean more work and stress for the teachers.  It might even put their jobs at risk.  So they oppose it.  By doing so, they lower expectations and foster academic failure, especially for low-income minorities.

But conservatives miss the pedagogical point that the volume of standards and testing actually diminishes the quality of education.  This article from the New York Times discusses how Scarsdale High School - one of the best in the country - has abolished it's Advanced Placement curriculum.  These are some of the best students and teachers in the country, and they have determined that the AP standards were actually hurting how much kids learned.

Scarsdale criticized the AP curriculum for testing too much breadth of content.  When the material is so vast, students are drilled into memorizing an amazing amount of superficial knowledge.  This sacrifices opportunities to learn in depth, which is when students can develop analytical skills, become critical thinkers, and make deeper connections.  One way of thinking about the trade off of depth and breadth is to consider what you would want your child to be: an independent analytical thinker, or an encyclopedic repository of superficial knowledge?  Like the AP standards, state standards tilt learning toward the encyclopedic end of the spectrum.  Most educators think this is a lower quality education: we want our kids to think and write more than recite, not the other way around.

Scarsdale's move is politically important.  It demonstrates that great teachers who want the best for their students understand that current AP and state standards undermine their effort.  It undermines the conservative narrative that opponents of NCLB-style testing are lazy teachers unions putting their interests first.