Testing and teaching are at odds

I will look at any additional evidence to confirm the opinion to which I have already come.

 --Lord Molson, British politician (1903-1991)

The Washington Post ran a piece On Leadership July 18 and 19, 2011, that featured responses to the Atlanta cheating scandal from Dan Ariely, Arne Duncan, Howard Gardner and Steven Pearlstein.

Despite the evidence mounting against high stakes, standardized testing, Arne Duncan and many other advocates for test and punish accountability want to stay the course with their "despite cheating scandals, testing and teaching are not at odds" mantra. So powerful is Duncan's need for consonance, his reaction to disconfirming evidence is to criticize, distort and dismiss cheating as the sole responsibility of those individuals who did the cheating.

In other words, Duncan is saying "mistakes were made, but not by me." This mental jockeying is known as confirmation bias, and at the moment Duncan is its poster boy.

False dichotomies make choosing easy. Duncan frames his argument very carefully -- either you are for accountability (with him) or you are against accountability (against him). But in reality, the situation is far from this simple.

In her book Willful Blindness, Margaret Heffernan writes about "the ostrich instruction":

We all recognize the human desire at times to prefer ignorance to knowledge, and to deal with conflict and change by imagining it out of existence... In burying our heads in the sand, we are trying to pretend the threat doesn't exist and that we don't have to change... A preference for the status quo, combined with an aversion to conflict, compels us to turn a blind eye to problems and conflict we just don't want to deal with.

Sometimes it's the leaders with the most power and responsibility who are the most blind because they believe they know what they were doing -- or feel like they have to look like they know what they are doing.

In their book Mistakes Were Made but not by Me, Carol Tavris Elliot Aronson write:

In a study of people who were being monitored by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) while they were trying to process dissonant or consonant information about George Bush or John Kerry, Drew Westen and his colleagues found that the reasoning areas of the brain virtually shut down when participants were confronted with dissonant information, and the emotion circuits of the brain lit up happily when consonance was restored. These mechanisms provide a neurological basis for the observations that once our minds are made up, it is hard to change them. 

Indeed, even reading information that goes against your point of view can make you all the more convinced you are right.

In light of this, it's not surprising that when test and punish accountability supporters like Arne Duncan are faced with evidence that shows cheating as an inevitable and inherent characteristic of high stakes testing, they simply turn to discrediting the facts and become even more committed to their own argument. At this point, I'll be fair to Duncan and say that this behavior is as predictable as it is unfortunate, especially if he believes staying the course is his only option. Because people become more certain they are right if they can't undo it, nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it's the only one you have.

At this point, I'm reminded of what Edward De Bono meant when he said:

If you never change your mind, why have one?

This is precisely why we need to listen to people like Bob Schaeffer from Fairtest who say:

The failure of NCLB and its state-level clones cannot be reversed by “staying the course,” “raising the bar” or any of the other faith-based notions frequently invoked by high-stakes testing true-believers.

Raising class sizes, Ruining the schools

There are dangerous education deform templates in America that run the risk of establishing a horrific precedent for others all over the world.

The latest comes from Kansas City, Missouri's Public School District superintendent John Covington. The Parents Across America Blog explains:

Last week at a school board meeting, Kansas City, MO School District superintendent John Covington told the school board that there is no research that supports reduced class size linked to increased student achievement. During the meeting, Covington cited the views of Bill Gates, who has minimized the importance of class size and suggested that teachers be paid more for teaching larger classes.

Covington went on to say that his staff had identified the “best” teachers in the district and would be giving them additional students. This was less than a week before school was scheduled to begin. The day after this announcement, teachers in the early grades received their class lists. Some first grade teachers were assigned 37 students per class, and some kindergarten teachers had 25-30 – compared to other teachers in the same schools, who had twenty students per class. Interestingly, some of these larger classes were staffed with brand new Teach for America recruits.

Then on August 19, Covington hosted a breakfast for eight elementary classroom teachers from about six schools out of 23, in grades 3-5th, whom he identified as “the best in the district.” He did not explain how he determined that they were the best. He told them that if they were willing to take 6 to 8 additional students, he would give each of them them $10,000. This would mean they would have class sizes in the mid to upper thirties.

For the first year ever, principals were not allowed to assign teachers or kids to classes within their own buildings. Covington’s staff did all of that. They decided who would teach what grade level and which kids would be assigned to each teacher. Before, this has ALWAYS been handled by each principal for his/her school.

This is yet another example of how the suits have hijacked our education system to enact their own reforms that meet their needs. In this case the argument goes something like this:

• Explicitly talk about student achievement while meaning nothing more than high scores on standardized tests.
• Down play outside of the classroom factors (poverty and family) as mere excuses and over-emphasize the importance of inside of the classroom factors (teacher quality)
• Show the public that student achievement (test scores) does not rise with lower class sizes nor fall with high class sizes
• Define good teaching as producing high test scores.
• Bribe teachers with merit pay and bonuses to increase test scores and willingly take on more students.

The result is that opportunistic superintendents like John Covington can save money and garnish large financial bonuses while padding their resumes in an intensive campaign wrought with shameless self-promotion -- all on the backs of our children.

Rod Paige orchestrated the Texas Miracle which was later reported to be nothing more than a mirage, but not before George W. Bush named him Secretary of Education.

Arne Duncan's record in Chicago has also proven to be at best troublesome, but that didn't stop him from being awarded the opportunity to do what didn't work in Chicago to the entire nation.

Beverly Hall won national praise and lavish bonuses during her 11 year tenure as Atlanta's Public School superintendent only to resign in 2010 because of a city-wide cheating scandal.

If John Covington in Kansas City, MO plays his cards right, he can cram real children into less classrooms while fabricating progress in the name of furthering his career.

When we go to Wall Street economists for our educational advice, we get what we pay for. When we allow Bill Gates to influence experiments on our children, we allow our children to be subjected to misguided theories that have already been proven wrong. Be wary of anyone who professes that class size doesn't matter. The research is clear: as long as you define student achievement as more than just high test scores then class size matters.

Until teachers, parents and students refuse our cooperation with these test and punish, control from afar corporate deformers, our children's education will continue to service the best interests of others.

Learning from cheating

The cheating scandal in Atlanta is an important event to learn from. As a solutions focused parent and teacher, I see all problems not as a time for punitive measures but as teachable moments.

Teachable moments are by definition acts of working with people - that's why we must resist simply doing things to people via punishment. The conventional wisdom around punishing cheaters is as tempting as it is distracting. After all, there's a big difference between preventing students from being able to cheat and focusing on why they wanted to cheat in the first place. The former may feel productive, but only the latter is productive.

Cheating is rarely solved by simply more rules and regulations followed by harsher reinforcements. We must refrain from attributing the problem of cheating solely on the cheaters themselves. The teachable moment here can be found in thoughtfully reflecting upon the circumstances and environments that the cheaters were immersed in when they cheated. The real question here is not "How will the cheaters be punished?", but instead "Why did the cheaters cheat?"

Alfie Kohn writes in his article Who's Cheating Whom?:

One major cause of cheating, then, is an academic environment in which students feel pressured to improve their performance even if doing so involves methods that they, themselves, regard as unethical. But when you look carefully at the research that confirms this discovery, you begin to notice that the worst environments are those in which the pressure is experienced in terms of one’s standing relative to others.

Kohn goes on to describe a grocery list of ways to create an environment ripe with cheating. Cheating is more common when:

• teachers have little to no relationship or connections with their students

• teachers care care more about other things than their students

• students experience their learning as boring, irrelevant, or overwhelming

• learning is prescribed rigidly in a prefabricated curriculum

• students perceive that the ultimate goal of learning is to get good grades

• there is an emphasis on honor rolls and other incentives to heighten the salience of grades

• parents offer financial inducements for academic success

• schools value product more than process, results more than discovery and achievement more than learning

• students are led to focus more on how well they're learning than what they're learning

• teachers emphasize good grades, high test scores and being smart

• competition is valued over collaboration

Alternatively, Kohn explains that cheating is far less common when:

• learning is genuinely engaging and meaningful to the students

• exploring ideas remains a priority over a single-minded emphasis on rigor

• students' opinions are respected and welcomed in a democratic classroom

• a disposition to finding out about the world is nourished

• teachers made it clear to kids that the point of school is to enjoy learning and that understanding mattered more than memorizing and when mistakes were accepted as a natural result of exploration.

When people are encouraged to do whatever it takes to achieve, we shouldn't be surprised when they do whatever it takes (read: cheat). If school is about performance over process and a premium is placed on results, then cheating makes perfect sense; after all, if all you need is to look smart, then cheating can get you there. However, if real learning is your objective, then cheating suddenly makes very little sense. Where cheating might make you look smart, it will never actually make you smarter.

Devising and implementing more rigorous punishments for cheaters is the equivalent to shutting the barn door after the horses have all run out - in other words, it's a massive exercise in missing the point.

When we stop to reflect upon why cheaters cheat, we dedicate ourselves to understanding that cheating has less to do with the characteristics of individual cheaters and more to do with the priorities of schools and practices of educators. In fact, seeing cheating as symptom of a larger systemic problem may the be the only hope we have of reducing the frequency of cheating.