The most important problem facing American children today

If we don't properly identify the real problems that plague our schools, and more generally our society, we risk implementing solutions that actually make the problems worse.

If we misinterpret standardized test scores as our window into the quality of our schools, rather than as a reflection for affluence and opportunity, we risk waging war on teachers and schools when we should be waging war on poverty.

Here is a graphic that I first saw on Valerie Strauss's blog the Answer Sheet where she asks the question, "What is the most important problem facing American children?" She writes:

According to the Academic Pediatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, it is the effects of poverty on the health and well being of young people. But, they concede, there is no sustained focus on childhood poverty, or a unified pediatric voice speaking on the problem, or a comprehensive approach to solving it.

Inevitably when we discuss poverty and education, a couple of questions come up:

Does this mean poor people can't learn? No, this does not mean poor people can't learn. All people can learn and people living in poverty are people, too. What this means is that children suffering from the affects of poverty have their potential growth and health stunted. To say that poverty matters for children who are trying to learn is not to make excuses -- it's acknowledging the truth. 

Does this mean we have to choose between providing good schools and waging war on poverty? No, we do not have to choose between good schools and an equitable society, but let's not pretend we are doing enough to reduce the number of children in poverty. (1 in 5 in United States; 1 in 10 in Alberta; 1 in 25 in Finland) And let's not pretend that education alone can lift people out of poverty.

People who say poverty is no excuse are making excuses about doing nothing about poverty.

Please Read: Valerie Strauss

This is another post in a series that I wish to call Please Read. My purpose here is to randomly and inconsistently provide a handful of links on a certain topic that should be read.

I honestly don't know what I would do without Valerie Strauss's blog The Answer Sheet. I know no other journalist in the popular press that shows such a heightened understanding for how children learn. I am over-the-top impressed with both her posts and the brilliant guest posts she publishes in the name of real learning, good teaching, authentic assessment and progressive education. Thank you, Valerie Strauss!

In this past week, she has featured a number of must read posts:

Advice to Education Dept. on newest Race to the Top by Monty Neil

Kozol: "I'm sick of begging" Congress to do the right thing by Valerie Strauss

Why giving standardized tests to young children is 'really dumb' by David Berliner

How to do the right thing in a system that is wrong? by Marion Brady

My first piece in the Washington Post

I was pretty happy to see my post published in Valerie Strauss's The Answer Sheet in The Washington Post.

Here's a comment that was left for my post that gave me a good chuckle. I think you'll enjoy it too:

This Canadian educator better stay in Canada.

He would be out of place here in the United States where educators have abandoned common sense.

How else explain American educators accepting the idea in 2001 of the government mandating that every American child will be proficient by 2014?

The rule for American educators is not common sense but the ability to accept the absurd. They have been doing it since 2001 and practice has so far made them perfect at their willingness to accept the absurd. Witness their acceptance of Race To The Top.

Stay in Canada. Educators lose their ability to think in the United States. It may be the water.

Campbell's Law and Standardized Testing

I am so thankful for The Washington Post's Valerie Strauss. She is one of the few journalists that I know of who actually publish something about education that is worth reading.

Today a post written by Justin Snider features a handful of great reasons why we need to be more than a little skeptical of standardized test scores.

The case against standardized testing is a good one, but for many the idea that high test scores are at best unhelpful and at worst harmful to a good education system is quite counter-intuitive.

Today I wish to draw your attention, as Justin Snider has, to a well-known (but not well-known enough) social science law called Campbell's Law. Here is an excerpt from a book by David Berliner and Sharon Nichols:

Campbell's law stipulates that "the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it was intended to monitor. Campbell warned us of the inevitable problems associated with undue weight and emphasis on a single indicator for monitoring complex social phenomena. In effect, he warned us about the high-stakes testing program that is part and parcel of No Child Left Behind.

I've come to identify Campbell's Law as high stake testing's Kryptonite. But remember that Campbell's Law is not just true for manipulative, top-down, reward and punish education policies. It is a law that rears its unavoidable head whenever you try to legislate professional behavior. In medicine, Campbell's Law plays a role in explaining why linking doctors pay to performance can leave the sickest patients without proper care, and in education, how lower performing students are being left behind by the very law that vowed not to do so.

For more on the devastating effects Campbell's Law has on education, I invite you to read David Berliner and Sharon Nichol's brilliant book Collateral Damage: How High Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools.

Timing Limits

Howard Gardner makes the case for rethinking time limits:

Valerie Strauss's blog The Answer Sheet has a wonderful post on the limitations of time constraints. Props to Valerie as she is a writer who truly gets education.

Few tasks in life--and very few tasks in scholarship--actually depend on being able to read passages or solve math problems rapidly....IIndeed, by eliminating the timed component, the College Board would signal that background knowledge, seriousness of purpose, and effort--not speed and glibness--are the essentials of good scholarship. And if, in the future, students were allowed to bring dictionaries, or even to have access to the Web, so much the better. Such a change would far more accurately duplicate the conditions under which serious individuals at any level of expertise actually do their work.