One thing we can learn from international studies is that it may help if decisions are made closer to those who are affected by them. Not only are all the high-scoring countries much, much smaller than most of our 50 states, much less the US as a whole, but many do NOT have a national curriculum or national exams.
Those words appear in a recent post by Deborah Meier, nationally-known educator, at the Education Week blog she shares with Diane Ravitch, another nationally-known educator. The post is entitled Teachers and the Choices They've Always Had and is well worth the read, as is most of what Deborah writes. Given the emphasis we have heard from presidential candidates about high standards, and the insistence of some that what we need are national standards, I want to use this diary to explore a bit what Deborah posted, and as per my wont add a few thoughts of my own.
Let me continue the quote with which I began with Deborah's next three paragraphs before I offer some commentary of my own.
That’s what Linda Darling-Hammond reported to us last weekend at a meeting of the Forum for Education and Democracy! We were all startled, having bought the oft-repeated claim that international studies prove that national exams equal high scores. In some of the "high-scoring" nations, standards are set by districts, and in others by even smaller sub-units. And, none come close to doing as much mandating as we do.
Which nations was Linda referring to? At the top on most of the TIMMS and PISA tests are Finland, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Canada and South Korea. Also usually Switzerland and sometimes Japan. Singapore? That’s a city, not a State, and, after all, virtually all of our cities have had citywide standards for a long time. Some of the list above do and some don’t have "national" standards and tests, and some have standards but no national tests; Japan now does have both—but didn’t when they were ranking highest!
Also, a reminder: Most are highly advanced welfare states, compared with the US. Last year, the US ranked 20th of 21 in UNICEF’s data on the welfare of children and at the bottom of a list of 24 countries in terms of relative poverty. As in the case of test scores, how these figures are calculated is worth learning more about.
I feel a little awkward pursuing this. I am one of those who think most international comparisons in education have serious flaws. In this I am influenced in part by the work of people like Gerald Bracey and Iris Rotberg, the latter a person with whom I took two courses in my doctoral studies and with whom I am coauthor of a monograph. In my own exploration of the questions on TIMMS, done in one of those courses, I was able to demonstrate a number of serious flaws in how the data was accumulated, including issues such as countries being able to change questions to meet local conditions (Hungary replacing questions dealing with coastal biology because they are landlocked) and selection of students who participated (the US testing students who had not yet had Calculus and comparing to those in other countries who had, or had received two years of physics). One problem was clearly demonstrated by the physics question on which US students totally outperformed those around the world: it had to do with the stopping distance of an automobile, something with which American teenagers, with their easy access to automobiles at least as passengers, would have greater familiarity than would most students in other countries. But since we find American schools constantly battered by comparisons with other nations on international measures like TIMMS I certainly wish to ensure that we do not derive completely erroneous conclusions from the data. Thus what Deborah writes is of great interest to me.
Deobrah Meier is such a clear writer that she does not need me to explain what she has stated. Nevertheless, let me focus on a couple of points. First, "high-scoring" nations tend not to have standards set across large nations. Many are much smaller than many of our states, and some, like Singapore, are basically the size of a large American city. Japan has seen its ranking decline since it added national standards and national tests (and remember, once you move to national standards the pressure to measure performance on those standards by national tests will be inexorable), and almost all of the nations whose scores are very high tend to be nations with extensive social welfare systems that would put this nation to shame.
Education does not occur in isolation from the rest of society. Hungry children do not learn as well as those whose bellies are not empty - that is one reason we have long had a school lunch program, and even moved in the direction of a school breakfast program. But social welfare extends far beyond that, to include things like basic medical care (something many American children still lack - think only of the recent battles over SCHIP).
I worry about those, including the presidential candidate I support, who find it necessary to talk about rigorous or high standards in order for our children to compete in the international economy. I want to quote part of another paragraph from Meier that addresses this issue:
Someone wrote me recently about how Massachusetts is being touted for the rigorousness of its standards. Proof: that it includes in its 4th grade language arts test a paragraph from Tolstoy! It turns out to be an "urban myth". However the item on Tolstoy does appear on a test published by NWEA called MAP, and the item is amazingly "easy" if one has been well-prepared on test-taking skills, not on literacy or literature.
For some, the "proof" of rigor is how many children fail to achieve success when measured on that standard. Ummm, might not that be more of a case of a measurement that is not meaningful? And as Meier notes of the standard she discusses, far too often success on such measurements is more a question a test-taking skills than of underlying knowledge, ability, or skills applicable in real-world settings.
Deborah describes the final paragraph of her posting as changing the subject. I think it is quite relevant to the overall context in which we discuss issues like standards. Thus I want to ensure that we consider her words:
To completely change the subject, for a moment. (Although maybe it’s right ON the subject?) I’ve been looking around the country at prekindergarten and kindergarten classrooms. I have noted that all the staples of the classrooms I taught in are now absent. No blocks (or a few old cardboard ones!), no pretend corners, no paint and clay, no sand or water, no cooking and no animals or plants! And since the classroom represents for many parents the model "learning environment" I’ll bet those things are increasingly absent from homes as well. All the ways in which humans have learned about the "real world" have been replaced by virtual realities (and take-out order dinners) carefully fed to passive watchers. I suspect the impact of introducing our young to the world in this manner will not be good. I worry how few of us are focused on this. It worries me far more these days than low scores on advanced math tests and won’t be solved by simply starting school earlier.
This administration attempted to turn Head Start into a reading program (perhaps hoping that one or more of its supporters could thereby make a profit such as those we saw in the infamous Reading First program?), but strong work by a number of people prevented that from happening. Still, we are increasingly seeing that early childhood education is being distorted into the first steps of what has happened to much of the rest of education - standardized teaching, standardized testing, all in the name of higher standards. It is one area in which the words I hear in stump speeches sometimes concern me. In the name of efficiency and of our desire for greater achievement for our children (although really we mean for economic success loosely defined) we in fact waste the resource of individual learning and the creativity that can flow from the non-standardized educational environment. Meier worries that what happens in our schools is now transferring to our homes because
classroom represents for many parents the model "learning environment"
I think it is worse than that. We hear political leaders talking about parental responsibility to provide a proper learning environment for our children and one cannot help but think that such rhetoric reinforces an ideal that anything that does not support higher test scores represents some level of parental failure.
I want to see a major change in how we do our politics. I hope that in the process of attempting to achieve that political change we do not get caught by our rhetoric and fail to recognize that in the long-term the paradigms we have been using to drive educational policy for the past several decades have been creating many of the problems we now have to address. We may know what works, as we often hear from the man whose candidacy for president I support, but it is not merely a question of will to apply that knowledge. It is also very much a question of changing a mindset that buys into things like international comparisons as a means of driving educational policy decisions, that uses "rigorous standards" and test scores - even as we hear that high-stakes standardized tests cannot be the only meaure - as the frame in which a commitment to education is espoused.
I wish politicians would take the time to truly understand what has happened to education. We are approaching the 25th Anniversary of "A Nation at Risk." Two and a half decades of educational policy have been distorted by fear of falling behind other nations, and in the process we have so distorted our educational system that we have in fact begun to fall behind. If it is wrong to use fear to drive our national security and international relations policies, why is it still appropriate to use such an approach in driving educational policies? Why do we not see a commitment to change the mindset that got us into this mess?
Deborah Meier may or may not be happy with how I used her words. As is often the case, the words I read from others prod my own thinking. I hope what I have offered, from Deborah and from my own warped mind, may provoke some thoughts from you, dear readers, and I look forward to what you might choose to offer in response.
Peace.