Telling time with a Broken Clock: The trouble with standardized testing

Education Canada Magazine

June 2013

Telling Time with a Broken Clock: The trouble with standardized testing

"The more we learn about standardized testing, particularly in its high stakes incarnation, the more likely we are to be appalled." 

– Alfie Kohn 

What do standardized test scores really tell us? As with many public policy questions, this is a complex question – yet too many people assume to know its answer. Whole school jurisdictions and entire nations define themselves by their standardized test results, including provincially administered examinations and international instruments such as Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). All of these programs, justified by their so-called impartiality and objectivity, share the assumption that the scores must be the public's “transparent” window into the quality of our schools.



Best-selling author and blogger Seth Godin reminds us that the worst kind of clock is a clock that randomly runs a little fast or a little slow. "If there's no clock," Godin writes, "we go seeking the right time. But a wrong clock? We're going to be tempted to accept what it tells us."[1] Godin's message is that tracking the wrong data or misreading good data can get us into trouble. What if standardized test scores aren't telling us what we think they are telling us? What if the scores are illusions that are giving us false confidence? What if our reliance on standardized testing to judge our schools is like relying on a broken clock for time?

If education policy pundits (many of whom are not teachers) and politicians expect the public to trust the scores as prima facie evidence of the quality of teaching and learning that goes on in our schools, then the public needs to know more about the costs and consequences of standardized testing. It is time to move past our historic reliance on standardized testing programs driven by educational bureaucracies satisfied to measure what is easiest to measure. Canada’s already strong public school systems will not punch past their current levels of performance unless we move to a new approach to public assurance.

Measuring what matters least

Ask any parents what their long-term concerns and goals are for their children, and seldom will you hear about test scores and world rankings. Their concerns are compelling, existential and heartfelt. Parents want their kids to be happy, hard working, motivated, responsible, honest, empathetic, intelligent, collaborative, creative and courageous. Of course we want our children to grow academically, but we also want them to grow emotionally, socially and physically, and this requires a well-rounded education that cannot be evaluated by standardized tests. This is not an argument against academics, after all academics should play a large role in school -- however, even when it comes to numeracy and literacy, standardized tests tend to be limited to measuring forgettable facts while ignoring the higher level creative and critical thinking. It makes a lot of sense to question the scores when you know that the tests are an amazingly contrived and unrealistic form of assessment that measures what matters least. It’s time we shifted from valuing what we measure to measuring what we value.

Campbell’s Law

Well-known (but not well-known enough) in social science, Campbell's Law tells us 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.”[2] In the case of standardized testing, corruption and distortion can come in a variety of ways. Here are three examples:

Teaching or testing? Teaching to the test and excessive test preparation invalidates inferences that can be drawn from the scores – yet they are the inevitable response to pressure to produce good test scores. Classroom time is devoured by not only the tests themselves but also practice tests, pre- and post-tests, field tests for the tests, benchmark tests, teacher tests, district tests, and state or provincial tests. Because testing is not teaching, this ultimately leads to a loss of opportunities for students to have a broad range of educational experiences, and the first things to go usually end up being the arts and physical activity – which do not lend themselves to be easily tested.

Learning or cheating? The moment low-stakes test scores are publicized to rank and sort teachers or schools, they become high-stakes tests. Where there is smoke, there is usually fire, and where there is high-stakes standardized testing, there is cheating. We can bemoan this inconvenience or play the blame game, but it won't change anything. When we stop and reflect on why cheaters cheat, systems thinking tells us that cheating has less to do with the characteristics of individual teachers or students and more to do with the priorities of schools and school systems.

Raising children or raising scores? When schools are encouraged to focus on test scores, some come to see children less as individuals of worth regardless of their academic ability, and more as score increasers and score suppressors. Sadly, the more the scores are made to count for teachers and schools, the more the scores count against the children who need the most help. They will be seen as undesirable; after all, they are the students most likely to score low, dragging down the school's ranking. This becomes even truer when (as in the U.S.) merit pay schemes marry teacher pay to the scores and/or when a school's reputation hinges on being publicly ranked. Under these twisted circumstance, schools may come to know more about raising scores than raising children.

We can no more skirt the real-world ramifications of Campbell's Law than Wile E. Coyote could avoid the punishing effects of gravity. Nichols and Berliner explains, "apparently, you can have (a) higher stakes and less certainty about the validity of assessment or (b) lower stakes and greater certainty about validity. But you are not likely to have both high stakes and high validity. Uncertainty about the meaning of test scores increases as the stakes attached to them become more severe."[3]

Socio-economics

Alfie Kohn begins his article “Fighting the Tests: A practical guide to rescuing our schools” by stating, "Don't let anyone tell you that standardized tests are not accurate measures. The truth of the matter is they offer a remarkably precise method for gauging the size of the houses near the school where the test was administered."[4] The inconvenient truth about standardized testing is that socioeconomic status is responsible for an overwhelming proportion (50 to 70 percent) of the variance in test scores. The strongest predictor of student performance on achievement tests is socio-economic status, which is why it is a mistake to believe that the scores tell us about school quality when really they are reflecting affluence or poverty.

No school or school system has ever become great without great teachers, but what can an excellent teacher do about a child who needs glasses, has cavities or is hungry? To say that teacher or school quality is the most important variable in education is at best naive. Education historian Diane Ravitch writes, "Reformers tell us that teachers are the most important influence within the school on student scores, and that is right. But the teacher contribution to scores is dwarfed by the influence of family and other out-of-school factors."[5]

Ultimately, great teachers make great schools, but great teachers can't do it alone – they require the support of an equitable society. If we are not careful, we risk misinterpreting the scores, and instead of waging war on poverty and inequity, we end up waging war on teachers and schools.

Dispelling the Corporate “Reform” Agenda

Finland's Pasi Sahlberg warns us about how the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) focuses schools on competition, standardization and test-based accountability. With GERM, "education has become a commodity where the efficiency of service delivery ultimately determines performance."[6]

Alongside the rush to introduce unproven technologies into classrooms, standardized testing in the United States has become a political instrument wielded by organizations such as Students First, Democrats for Education Reform and the American Legislative Exchange Council. Linking teacher pay to student test scores, and eliminating tenure and collective bargaining have become popular methods for undermining confidence in public schools so that education entrepreneurs can pour private equity and venture capital into companies that aim to profit from public education.

After a decade of intense standardized testing and sanctions under No Child Left Behind, California Democrats passed a resolution that aims at supporting public education and dispelling the corporate ‘reform’ agenda by stating, “the reform initiatives of Students First, rely on destructive anti-educator policies that do nothing for students but blame educators and their unions for the ills of society, make testing the goal of education, shatter communities by closing their public schools, and see public schools as potential profit centers and children as measurable commodities.”[7]

In the face of tough economic times, some governments might see this as a way of easing pressure on their beleaguered budgets; however, Diane Ravitch warns us that, "Our schools will not improve if we expect them to act like private, profit-seeking enterprises. Schools are not businesses; they are a public good. The goal of education is not to produce higher scores, but to educate children to become responsible people with well-developed minds and good character."[8]

Over the last two decades, the United States has proven to be a cautionary tale for how Canada, and the world, should not reform education, and Canadians would be wise not to think that the 49th Parallel offers any kind of inherent insulation from the corporate education reform agenda.

Building a better clock

The way forward is not to build schools that are a better version of yesterday. It is telling that the demand for standardized testing intensifies the further you get from classrooms, and yet authentic accountability and public assurance needs to happen within schools and communities, not driven by a tired-out model of bureaucratic accountability focused on compliance.

A move away from standardized testing is not a case for the absence of accountability – it is a pathway to supporting innovation and creativity. Ruth Sutton reminds us, "The issue is not whether we need information about the learning and achievement of our children and young people, but what kind of information we need, and how best to gather it."[9] Once we can see that standardized testing is like a broken clock, we can work together to figure out how to build a better clock.

Building a better clock and better schools starts with asking tough questions – which is precisely the spirit behind an Action Canada Task Force report titled Real Accountability or an Illusion of Success?[10] that invites Canadians to take a deeper look at the goals of public education and the role of standardized testing.

Alberta should be congratulated for their recent move away from their grade 3, 6 and 9 Provincial Achievement Tests. Now Alberta requires the courage to see that the replacement for the old tests should not be new tests. From a policy perspective, accountability models that are based on census testing of entire student populations do little to support student progress and are not cost effective. A shift from testing every student to a sample program using performance-based assessments would be less obstructive, cost less and provide more meaningful information.

Given the highly relational nature of the teaching and learning process, the best teachers know that assessment is not a spreadsheet; it's a conversation. They also know that there is no substitute for what teachers observe while their students are actively learning, and this is why the best assessments ask students to actually do something that is in a context and for a purpose. Unlike standardized tests which cannot provide anything more than a limited and incomplete snapshot of a student on a single day, a collection of performance assessments assembled in a learning portfolio can inform the teaching and learning process in a timely fashion, while simultaneously assuring the public that students are receiving a high quality education.

To enhance public assurance, Andy Hargreaves suggests departments of education should shift from a “bureaucratic accountability model to a locally focused, student-driven assurance model based on school-development plans and teachers as leaders in innovation.”[11] The means for accomplishing this can be found in programs like Alberta’s Initiative for School Improvement (AISI). A number of community-based school improvement initiatives such as AISI exist throughout Canada and yet are vulnerable to cuts by government, such as Alberta who recently axed AISI, that see times of fiscal belt-tightening as an excuse to reduce investments in innovation – precisely the wrong time to reduce support for creativity and risk-taking.

It might be argued that standardized testing has allowed us to build good enough schools; after all, even a broken clock is right twice a day. However, business guru Jim Collins reminds us that "good is the enemy of great." If we aspire to create a great school for all children, we need to seek an end to standardized testing and replace it with more sophisticated and more demanding processes for public assurance.

Notes

1 Seth Godin, "The worst kind of clock," Seth Godin (Blog), September 21, 2012, http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/09/the-worst-kind-of-clock.html.

2 Sharon Nichols and David Berliner, Collateral Damage: How high stakes testing corrupts America's schools (Massachusetts: Harvard Education Press, 2008), 26-27.

3 Nichols and Berliner, Collateral Damage, 27.

4 Alfie Kohn, “Fighting the Tests: A practical guide to rescuing our schools,” Phi Delta Kappan (January 2001). http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/ftt.htm.

5 Diane Ravitch, "Why VAM Is Junk Science," Diane Ravitch's Blog, July 16, 2012, http://dianeravitch.net/2012/07/16/why-vam-is-junk-science/.

6 Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish Lessons: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland? (New York, Teachers College Press, 2011),100.

7 The California Democratic Party, Resolution 13-04.47: Supporting California’s Public School and Dispelling the Corporate “Reform” Agenda (April 14, 2013).

8 Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 227-28.

9 Alberta Assessment Consortium, A New Look At Public Assurance: Imagining the possibilities for Alberta students. http://www.aac.ab.ca/resources/pdf/Public%20Assurance%20Doc_final_may31.pdf.

10 Real Accountability or An Illusion of Success? A Call to Review Standardized Testing in Ontario. Action Canada Task Force Report.

http://testingillusion.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/illusion_of_success_EN.pdf.

11 Andy Hargreaves, foreward to A Great School for All: Transforming education in Alberta (Edmonton: Barnett House, 2012).

Standardized test scores are like a broken clock

Have you ever heard someone use standardized test scores to judge schools?

The Alberta Government recently released an information bulletin that boasted Alberta student performance results continue to rise:

The overall percentage of students who attained a standard of excellence on Grade 3, 6, and 9 provincial achievement tests (PATs) increased to 20.2 per cent from 19.5 per cent in the previous year. The percentage of students who met the acceptable standard also rose slightly to 75.5 per cent from 75.2 per cent. One of the highlights of the results is the percentage of students who achieved the standard of excellence in Science 6 and Science 9.

Many Albertans might take these standardized test score results as prima facia evidence that things are well. Many Albertans may be satisfied with this information and confidently move on with their regularly scheduled day, thinking that Alberta schools are not only doing well, but they are improving.

What if we are wrong? What if these scores are giving us false confidence? What if standardized test scores aren't telling us what we think they are telling us?

When some Albertans boasted about these results on Twitter, I responded with:

Assessing an education system via standardized test scores is like assessing a car by kicking the tires.

Some challenged me by asking:

Wouldn't the analogy be, "like assessing a car by comparing its gas mileage relative to motor size and tank capacity?"

My response: 

No. 

The assumption made by this analogy is that we think we know what standardized test scores tell us: we assume these scores are our window into the schools -- therefore we assume we can use these scores to judge the quality of teaching and learning that goes on in a school.

But what if these unquestioned assumptions about standardized testing are wrong?

Seth Godin writes:

The worst kind of clock... is a clock that's wrong. Randomly fast or slow. 

If we know exactly how much it's wrong, then it's not so bad. 

If there's no clock, we go seeking the right time. But a wrong clock? We're going to be tempted to accept what it tells us. 

What are you measuring? Keeping track of the wrong data, or reading it wrong is worse than not keeping track at all.

Standardized test scores are like a broken clock because we assume that these scores tell us what we need to know about our schools -- we assume that these scores reflect teaching and learning and therefore assume that if the numbers are rising that must be a good thing.

But what if this is misguided? What if our reliance on standardized tests to judge the quality of the teaching and learning in schools is like relying on a broken clock for time?

Consider this:

• Standardized test scores are a remarkable way of assessing the socioeconomic status of students and their families. Study after study has shown that out-of-school factors account for an overwhelming proportion of the variances in scores. That means that standardized tests tend to tell us more about what kids bring to school than what they do at school. Here's a Canadian example and an American example.

• There is research that suggests there is a statistical association between high scores on standardized tests and relatively shallow thinking.

• Campbell's Law tells us that the more standardized test scores are used for making decisions and judging schools, the more subject the scores will be to corruption and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the teaching and learning it was intended to monitor. This includes cheating scandals, teaching to the test and narrowing of educational opportunities.

• Standardized tests tend to measure what is easily measurable, which turns out to be what matters the least. There is a big difference between measuring what we value and valuing what we measure. When we narrow what matters to what can be measured by a standardized test, we fall victim to the MacNamara Fallacy which basically looks like this: (1) Measure whatever can be easily measured on a standardized test. (2) Disregard whatever can't be easily measured or given an arbitrary quantitate value. (3) Presume that what can't be measured easily isn't important. (4) Say what can't be easily measured doesn't even exist.

• There is research that suggests that when teachers are held accountable for their students' standardized test scores, they tend to become so controlling in their teaching style that the quality of students' performance actually declines.

To fully grasp why this is true, there's a lot to know about the arcane underpinnings of standardized tests; however, testing guru Daniel Koretz gives us a single principle that summarizes what we need to know:

Never treat a test score as a synonym for what children have learned or what teachers have taught.

Again, this too can be true for lots of reasons, but Alfie Kohn gives us a single principle that summarizes what we need to know:

A right answer on a test does not necessarily indicate understanding and a wrong answer does not necessarily indicate a lack of understanding.

I would imagine there are times when standardized test scores might reflect the teaching and learning that goes on in a school, but remember, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Standardized tests look good from afar but are far from good at reflecting what matters most when it comes to teaching and learning. The closer you look at standardized tests, the more you realize that their utility and convenience comes at an alarming and unacceptable cost. Ask yourself if what we're learning from standardized tests is worth the price.

I would rather no information - no data - nothing! than the grossly misleading and misused data that is extracted from standardized testing. As long as the public is fed standardized test scores, we will be tempted to accept what they tell us -- but if the public had no information about their schools, they would be forced to seek it out which might lead more people to actually step foot in their local schools.

The end of testsandgrades

When I share with people the case against grades, and that I plan on working with my children's teachers to reduce or eliminate grading from their education, I am met with a myriad of responses. Including this:

It sounds like you are "one of those parents". You should just homeschool your children or go to a private school.

This reaction saddens me.

Has public education become so rigidly, narrow minded and singularly focused on its bureaucratic policies that it can't even start to imagine how to meet the needs of the very people it's meant to serve?

Since when did public education become about scoring well on someone else's test or coming home with As on your report card?

Who is public education for if not for the children?

Before we can understand where we want to go, it's more than likely that we will need to know where we've already been. The future of school will have a lot to do with understanding the history of school.

Let's examine three excerpts:

Zander Sherman's book The Curiosity of School: Education and the Dark Side of Enlightenment is an important read because it outlines the often unknown, and disturbing, origins of public education. He writes:

In Prussia, it was school that enabled the secret training of soldiers. In America, it was school that was seized to create an educated labor pool, thanks to the financial contributions of Carnegie and Rockefeller. In Canada, it was school that was used to convert Native Canadians into just regular ones. In Asia, India and the rest of the world, school is the gatekeeper of power, privilege and prestige. The people who control it, control the world.

In his book Stop Stealing Dreams, Seth Godin writes about the origins of the multiple choice test:

In 1914, a professor in Kansas invented the multiple choice test. Yes, it's less than a hundred years old. 

There was an emergency on. World War I was ramping up, hundreds of thousands of new immigrants needed to be processed and educated, and factories were hungry for workers. The government had just made two years of high school mandatory, and we needed a temporary, high-efficiency way to sort students and quickly assign them to appropriate slots. 

In the words of Professor Kelly, "This is a test of lower order thinking skills for the lower orders." A few years later, as President of the University of Idaho, Kelly disowned the idea, pointing out that it was an inappropriate method to test only a tiny portion of what is actually taught and should be abandoned. The industrialists and the mass educators revolted and he was fired.

Thom Hartmann writes about the history of grades in his Complete Guide to ADHD:

Around the turn of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution was going full-bore. Piece-work payments were becoming increasingly popular, and many schools were beginning to pay teachers based on the number of students they had, as opposed to a flat salary. 

William Farish was a tutor at Cambridge University in England in 1792, and, other than his single contribution to the subsequent devastation of generations of schoolchildren, is otherwise undistinguished and unknown by most people. 

Getting to know his students, one may suppose, was too much trouble for Farish. It meant work, interacting and participating daily with each child. It meant paying attention to their needs, to their understanding, to their styles of learning. It meant there was a limit on the number of students he could thus get to know, and therefore a limit on how much money he could earn. 

So Farish came up with a method of teaching which would allow him to process more students in a shorter period of time. He invented grades. (The grading system had originated earlier in the factories, as a way of determining if the shoes, for example, made on the assembly line were "up to grade." It was used as a benchmark to determine if the workers should be paid, and if the shoes could be sold.) 

Grades did not make students smarter. In fact, they had the opposite effect: they made it harder for those children to succeed whose style of learning didn't match the didactic, auditory form of lecture-teaching Farish used.

Sometimes I like to ask: when did public education become hijacked by testsandgrades? But what if this is a misleading question? What if public education was never about helping each child construct meaning for themselves in a way that led them to lead a life of citizenship in a democracy? What if public education's purpose was to propagandize children into interchangeable, compliant workers and soldiers?

If we can't even agree why we have school, it should not surprise anyone that we can't agree on how we should do school.

Neil Postman writes in his book The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School:

In tracking what people have to say about schooling, I notice that most of the conversation is about means, rarely about ends. Should we privatize our schools? Should we have national standards of assessment? How should we use computers? What use can we make of television? How shall we teach reading? And so on. Some of these questions are interesting and some are not. But what they have in common is that they evade the issue of what schools are for. It is as if we are a nation of technicians, consumed by our expertise in how something should be done, afraid or incapable of thinking about why.

I write this book in the hope of altering, a little bit, the definition of the "school problem" -- from means to ends. "End," of course, has at least two important meanings: "purpose" and "finish." Either meaning may apply to the future of schools, depending on whether or not there ensues a serious dialogue about purpose. By giving the book its ambiguous title, I mean to suggest that without transcendent and honorable purpose, schooling must reach its finish, and the sooner we are done with it, the better. With such a purpose, schooling becomes the central institution through which the young may find reasons for continuing to educate themselves.

Because the origins of public education and testsandgrades are mired in goals that have less to do with citizenship and critical thinking and more to do with compliance and labour, it is important that we engage those who have never been invited to reconsider their unexamined assumptions about school. The truth is that many people are reassured by signs of formal-traditional school and are disturbed by their absence, and what's worse is that these same people are often offended when they are invited to rethink their preconceptions for what school should look and feel like.

Because the end of testsandgrades tend to sabotage our long term goals for our children, it's time we bring an end to testsandgrades. In other words, because testsandgrades do not have an honourable and transcendent purpose, they need to be finished. But nothing will change until good people become active in making change. Testsandgrades are not like death and taxes -- they are not like the weather -- they are pedagogical and political ideologies that can and should be opposed.

Here is a list of all my posts on rethinking assessment and abolishing testsandgrades.

Consider checking out the Grading Moratorium.

To do whatever you tell me

Do you remember that scene from Forrest Gump when Gump joined the army and met his Drill Sergeant?

Drill Sergeant: Gump! What's your sole purpose in this army?

Forrest Gump: To do whatever you tell me, drill sergeant!

Drill Sergeant: God damn it, Gump! You're a god damn genius! This is the most outstanding answer I have ever heard. You must have a goddamn I.Q. of 160. You are goddamn gifted, Private Gump. Listen up, people...

Forrest Gump: [narrates] Now for some reason I fit in the army like one of them round pegs. It's not really hard. You just make your bed real neat and remember to stand up straight and always answer every question with "Yes, drill sergeant."

Drill Sergeant: ...Is that clear?

Forrest Gump: Yes, drill sergeant!

Sometimes I think this is precisely how school works. Too often, I think we define the entire purpose of school as nothing more than obedience. We bastardize the terms respect and intelligence and make them nothing more than synonyms for compliance.

We've confused obedience with learning for too long.

In his book Stop Stealing Dreams, Seth Godin breaks it down into two columns:

Aware
Caring
Committed
Creative
Goal-setting
Honest
Improvising
Incisive
Independent
Informed
Initiating
Innovating
Insightful
Leading
Strategic
Supportive ----------------->

or

Obedient

Which column would you want for your kids? Which is good is enough for others' kids? Which would you want for your spouse? Which would you want your employer or colleagues to have?


Godin writes:

Now that obedience is less important and learning matters more than ever, we have to be brave enough to separate them. We can rebuild the entire system around passion instead of fear.

If our problem was that too many children get low testsandgrades, then compliance and obedience might be helpful tools, but this is not what ails public education. The real problem is that too many children are drop outs-in-waiting who eventually vote with their feet, or their minds, and opt out of the whole affair because they've lost their passion for learning.

To solve this problem, demanding more obedience and compliance will be at best unhelpful and at worst harmful.

Kids are weird

In his book We Are All Weird, Seth Godin writes:

When we see a jogger off in the distance, our brain fills in the gaps. We don't imagine a red-haired giant, wearing a chartreuse jumpsuit and a Cameron Diaz smile. No, at this distance, we fill in the gaps with our prototype runner, a standard runner, the runner we always use when we imagine a runner. To do anything else seems a waste of time and effort. 

As we get closer, reality intrudes. This isn't an archetype, it's an actual person. Short, perhaps, or with just one leg, or limping or wearing street clothes. On close inspection, just about everybody is weird.

When we plan curriculum for students (read: doing curriculum to kids), we see them off in the distance, allowing our brains to fill in the gaps. We don't imagine the dyslexic kid who needs to be the primary caregiver for his siblings while his single mom works the night shift, the adolescent who spent the weekend in crisis stabilization in a psychiatric assessment unit at the local hospital or the teenager who can't sit in a desk for 10 minutes but spends hours in the backyard meticulously mastering their snapshot.

As we get closer to our kids, it becomes disturbingly clear that normal is a myth.

There is no cookie-cutter kid. No archetype student. All kids are human which makes them inherently weird -- and good thing too because diversity is what get's us through the day.

The best educators get what it means to say that every teacher is inexperienced with each new group of students. They get that prefabricated, content-bloated curriculums, pacing guides and laminated lesson plans are the definitive way to pretend to teach.

Upon closer inspection, almost every learner is weird and it's time school took the time to address their weird needs.

Grading distorts and bastardizes our love for learning

When I share that I assess my students everyday without ever needing to grade, I tend to get some very odd reactions. Because most people grow up with grading, many of us have been led to believe that learning and grading are synonymous. It's as if that because we know where there's smoke their's fire, we (wrongly) extrapolate that where there are grades there's learning.

It's more than a little ironic that many assume grading and learning to be synonyms, while others see them for what they really are -- antonyms.

So why is this?

In her post titled Distorted Vision: Knowing your own culture in order to know others, Sondra Thiederman puts it this way:

It is as if each of us is a fish in a fish bowl. The fish swims around inside the bowl and is surrounded by water and glass. The fish is unaware of the water and the glass and, most important, does not realize that those two substances distort the accuracy with which he sees the outside world. Our culture is like that water and glass. We see the world through a distorted screen created by our deeply and often subconsciously-held values and beliefs.

While a fish isn't aware of the glass and water, people immersed in school can't recognize how grading distorts and bastardizes our love for learning. Like a fish immersed in water, we are drowning in grading, and for the most part, we don't even know it.

Seth Godin tells this story in his book Linchpin:

A guy is riding in the first-class cabin of a train in Spain and to his delight, he notices that he's sitting next to Pablo Picasso. Gathering up his courage, he turns to the master and says, "Senior Picasso, you are a great artist, but why is your art, all modern art, so screwed up? Why don't you paint reality instead of these distortions?" 

Picasso hesitates for a moment and asks, "So what do you think reality looks like?" 

The man grabs his wallet and pulls out a picture of his wife. "Here, like this. It's my wife."

Picasso takes the photograph, looks at it and grins. "Really? She's very small. And flat, too."

We've immersed ourselves so much in grading that we can't even recognize that they are imaginary. Similar to how a photograph makes us small and flat, grades reduce learning to a mere symbol -- an A or 67% -- but neither the photograph or the grade can paint reality. They are only as real as constructs can be real - which isn't very much. When compared to a real person or real learning, both the photo and the grade are fraudulent fabrications. It may be convenient for us to pretend these fabrications are real but that doesn't make them so.

And until we come up for air and see grades for what they really are, small and flat, we will continue to experience learning as nothing more than a means to an end that most students can't wait to be rid of.

You don't want to work for them anyway

Image source: Flickr user www.flickr.com/photos/monkeyc/149621180/sizes/l/.
Quotation source: Seth Godin, The You Show.
Created by: darrendraper

Please read: Seth Godin

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.

Here are but a few posts by Seth Godin on education that are worth the read:

Moving beyond teachers and bosses

What you can learn from a lousy teacher

You can't say you can't play

Two kinds of schooling

The Wikipedia Gap

Leading with our linchpins

by Chris Wejr (@mrwejr)

“The problem is that most schools don’t like great teachers. They’re organized to stamp them out, bore them, bureaucratize them, and make them average.” -- Seth Godin

How many educators do you know that try to change the system of education? How many educators do you know that just stick to the status quo? How are these two different types of people treated by school and district leaders?

As a principal, I want people who challenge the education system and take risks to benefit our kids. I want people that say the way we have always done things is not the best way. I want people who reflect on current structures and practices and say to themselves: is this what is best for kids? I cannot recall who stated this but if we continue to do what we have always done, we will get what we have always had. To me, that’s not good enough.

In the past year, I have spoken to a number of people who are trying to create change in their classrooms and in the schools but have been told to “toe the line” both by administrators and colleagues. These important educators have been told to follow their lizard brain and conform, comply and follow instructions. Does this sound familiar? Is this what many schools also teach our kids? Is this what we actually want in our education system?

It is EASY to do what has always been done. When you do this, you rarely get criticized and you rarely even get noticed; you please the resistance. What is difficult to do is to be the one to change the system - to challenge the current norms and to be what Seth Godin calls a “Linchpin”. A linchpin is someone who is indispensable; someone who fights the resistance and uses their creativity to live on the edge of the box. “The linchpin feels the fear, acknowledges it, then proceeds.”

We need to be teaching students to not just “do school” but to take risks, try new initiatives and become indispensable. What better way to teach students this than to model this as educators? Now I realize that we have laws that govern education but as leaders and teachers, how can we work WITH our passionate staff and students who are taking risks, challenging the ‘truths’ and norms, and changing the education system?

Godin asks the question: “Would your organization be more successful if your employees were more obedient? Or, consider for a second: would you be more successful if your employees were more artistic, motivated, connected, aware, passionate, and genuine?”.

What kind of school culture do you want? How are you providing your staff with the autonomy to fight their lizard brain and challenge the status quo? Do you silence or encourage the voices of change?

How do you lead with your Linchpins?

It's easier to teach compliance than initiative

Godin says it all:

Compliance is simple to measure, simple to test for and simple to teach. Punish non-compliance, reward obedience and repeat. 

Initiative is very difficult to teach to 28 students in a quiet classroom. It's difficult to brag about in a school board meeting. And it's a huge pain in the neck to do reliably. 

Schools like teaching compliance. They're pretty good at it. 

To top it off, until recently the customers of a school or training program (the companies that hire workers) were buying compliance by the bushel. Initiative was a red flag, not an asset. 

Of course, now that's all changed. The economy has rewritten the rules, and smart organizations seek out intelligent problem solvers. Everything is different now. Except the part about how much easier it is to teach compliance.

Lend a hand

I think it's fantastic that Sir Ken Robinson is using his influence through social media to share a fantastic blog post by Seth Godin. It's a post that educators and parents could learn from...

I just wish Seth Godin, and others like him who celebrate widespread notoriety in the business world, would would use their influence to help make the world known to education experts such as Linda Darling-Hammond, Deborah Meier, Alfie Kohn, Yong Zhao, Diane Ravitch, Monty Neil, Pasi Sahlberg, and so many more.

While I'm sure Seth Godin would appreciate the Tweet from Sir Ken Robinson, which was retweeted about 100 times, Godin's post was tweeted almost 2000 times without Sir Ken's help.

I'd like us all to challenge those like Seth Godin to use their voice to promote the voices of others who need to be heard. I know too many brilliant blog posts that should get as much or more attention than Godin but go largely unnoticed.

A Culture of Testing

Josie Holford wrote her own version of a Seth Godin post on the dangers of obsessing over quantifiable measures. Seth Godin's original post is here, and Josie's is here and below:

A Culture of Testing

Many schools test everything. They’re very proud that they put out the sign that the next four days are test days and they are proud of their grades, GPA’s, test rankings, scores, test preparation, test driven curriculum, stress relief programs, stress therapy dogs, everything.

It’s almost enough to get you to believe that rigorous testing is the key to success. Results, results, results.

Except they didn’t test the teachers’ creativity and integrity and they didn’t test the children’s resilience and character.

And they didn’t test for an innovative and creative culture that valued imagination, teamwork and global awareness.

And they didn’t test for joy. kindness, mutual respect, sense of purpose and student engagement.

The biggest assets of classrooms and schools weren’t tested, because they couldn’t be because by then they had been destroyed anyway.

Sure, go ahead and test what’s testable. But the real victories come when you have the guts to cherish, value, develop and nurture the untestable.

This post coincides nicely with a tweet I sent out yesterday that:

It was retweeted 10 times. 

I think this is telling. 

There are a lot of people out there who are frustrated with an education system that simply sees students as test scores-in-waiting. A kid's body is not just a transportation device for their number two pencils. 

I would wager a guess that those who retweeted this understand all too well what Linda McNeil of Rice University meant when she said:

Measurable outcomes may be the least significant results of learning.

If you, like me, want to influence change, consider picking up a copy of Juanita Doyon's book Not With Our Kids You Don't. She offers this:

Each of us involved in education has a point at which inappropriate or unfair policies collide with our conscience or our good sense. For parents, the call to activism can be the forty-pound backpack destroying our fourth grader's posture or district-mandated sock color for our eighth grader. For teachers, it can be the district crabbing about our students' test scores and requiring us to attend expensive yet worthless "professional development", while we're assigned thirty-four students per period, in an unheated portable with mold-infested walls. For administrators it can be idiotic standardized curriculum or lack of community involvement and support. Any educational concern is a worthy cause for action.

Like Josie, I too have taken ideas from Seth Godin and applied it to education. I have two challenges for all educators: 

Firstly, find out whose agenda do you follow? And then stop waiting to be told what to do.

Something we create for ourselves

Things are changing.

Technology has not only revolutionized how the masses share information, but it has also liberated the masses to be creators of information. No longer do the select, privileged few maintain a monopoly on content. 

Content is cheap...

...but the imagination, creativity and courage to share it all is not.

Seth Godin writes about this:

More people than ever are creators. More people than ever go to work to use their minds, not just their hands. And more people than ever have a platform to share their point of view. I think that raises the bar for our understanding of how the world works.

Those who think blogging is merely an act of arrogance or wonder where someone can find the time or why someone would risk saying something they could be reprimanded for simply don't get it... yet.

I know far too many teachers who don't read a lick of literature on education... and many of them seem to wear it as a badge of honor. (I often wonder if its the former or the latter that concerns me the most) If you ask these deliberately uninformed teachers their opinion on classroom management, homework, standardized testing, textbooks or curriculum they all have an opinion.

They just know.

These are the same teachers who wait for the next externally imposed professional development day that their principal mandates or their superintendent dictates and then bitch that their needs weren't met by someone they hardly know. 

Stephen Downes, a Canadian education technology specialists begs us to reconsider our docility:

We need to move beyond the idea that an education is something that is provided for us, and toward the idea that an education is something that we create for ourselves. It is time, in other words, that we change out attitude toward learning and the educational system in general.

When Downes wrote this, I think he had the kids in mind, but I know he would agree that this should apply to all members of our species - even teachers!

As frustrated as this reality makes me, I am hopeful... in many ways that is why I blog.

I am hopeful that we can reach out to others and help influence them to start: 

• asking the tough questions
• challenging authority
• creating content
• reflecting on our practices
• taking ownership of their own learning
• thinking for themselves

What if the most influential people in children's lives modeled these characteristics?

Challenging Godin

I think Seth Godin is on to a couple things here. Firstly, we can't test ourselves to a good education system, and secondly, we need parents to properly ally themselves with teachers to refuse our cooperation with the testing debacle.

With that, I have to also issue a challenge to people like Seth Godin who are not educators but are lending a hand from a distance to educators who are progressive. Guys like Dan Pink and Seth Godin need to be able to speak to specific alternatives to traditional grades, sit-and-get-spit-and-forget worksheets and standardized fill-in-the-bubble tests. They need to familiarize themselves with project-based learning, performance assessments and portfolios. They need to be able to verbalize viable alternatives to the instruments that are creating compliance.

They need to lend a hand by citing educators like Deborah Meier, Alfie Kohn, Monty Neil, Linda Darling-Hammond and Yong Zhao - they need to do this so that their following who is predominantly from the business sector can become aware of the real experts in education.

Mistrust drives manipulation

Superiors are there to support you not dictate you.

Seth Godin writes about turning the traditional top-down power structure up-side down:

I always took the position that my boss (when I had a job) worked for me. My job was to do the thing I was hired to do, and my boss had assets that could help me do the job better. His job, then, was to figure out how best give me access to the people, systems and resources that would allow me to do my job the best possible way.


Of course, that also means that the people I hire are in charge as well. My job isn't to tell them what to do, my job is for them to tell me what to do to allow them to keep their promise of delivering great work.

If you go into work on Monday with a list of things for your boss to do for you (she works for you, remember?) what would it say? What happens if you say to the people you hired, "I work for you, what's next on my agenda to support you and help make your [learning] go up?"

Today's test and punish brand of accountability have left teachers deprofessionalized in a pool of distrust. I've come to know far too many teachers who are numb to top-down, teacher-proofing reform. For them, education reform has become a shopping list of dictates and demands, and so many teachers have come to see their principal or their superintendent as their superior who tells them what to do.

When I hear of school districts that mandate teacher's professional development, I am not surprised to also see their teachers disengaged from their own learning. Undert this climate, everyone comes to see professional development as this thing to just get through.

When interactions between teachers and administrators become more about power, things go awry. Harriet Rubin, a legendary innovator in the world of business-book publishing, sums this up when she said: "Freedom is actually a bigger game than power. Power is about what you can control. Freedom is about what you can unleash."


When you don't trust someone, you resort to controlling and manipulating them.

Mistrust drives manipulation.

In his Harvard Business Review blog, Bill Taylor writes:

So much of how we think about strategy, competition, and management remains centered on the zero-sum logic of amassing power: For me to win, you must lose. But almost anything that's hopeful and positive about business today is premised on spreading freedom — inviting all sorts of people, inside and outside your organization, to contribute ideas, improve your products and services, and otherwise have a voice and a seat at the table that they never used to have. For leaders, the most important question today is not How many people or departments or business units do you control? It is How much energy and participation have you unleashed?

Education reform should be less about compliance and more about ingenuity. If the teachers in the field aren't affored the opportunity to influence administration without appearing to be troublemakers, reform is destined to fail a thousand deaths.
Education reform must be less about control and more about collaboration. We would be wise to listen to Dan Pink when he speaks of autonomy, mastery and purpose.

We would also be wise to ponder Thomas Gordon's message:

The more you use power to try to control people, the less real influence you'll have on their lives.

For teachers, Gordon's words act as a kind of double-edged sword. Just as teachers have a need for collaboration with their administrators, so must teachers collaborate with their students.

This isn't a teacher thing - it's a human being thing.

The lizard brain, ninjas and pedagogy

Change is never easy.

One of the scariest things that comes with change is rationalizing the past. Everyone has an ego, and quite often we have to reason with our ego, so we don't crumble.

Here's what I mean.

If you've done something like teach or parent in a certain way for a very long time, it may be a very difficult thing to admit that perhaps you've been doing things wrong - or at least not as good as you thought you were. For every year of experience, your ego will take this more and more personally.

Inevitably, many of us then become defensive. Like a wounded animal whose been cornered by a fierce predator, we bunker down and resolve ourselves to a kind of pre-historic, fight or flight mentality.

Some like Seth Godin call this the lizard brain while others still like Steven Pressfield call it the resistance.

Godin explains:

The resistance is the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, compromise... The lizard is a physical part of your brain, the pre-historic lump near the brain stem that is responsible for fear and rage and reproductive drive...the lizard hates change and achievement and risk...The amygdala isn't going away. Your lizard brain is here to stay, and your job is to figure out how to quiet it and ignore it.

When we are challenged by others to change something we do or believe in, the lizard brain barks. And if that something is near and dear to us, like our parenting practices or teaching pedagogy - the resistance can be fierce.

Don't get me wrong, the lizard brain brain's fight or flight mentality can sometimes be a very good thing. In his book Confessions of a Public Speaker, Scott Berkun writes:

Even if you could completely shut off these fear-response systems.. it would be a bad idea for two reasons. First, having the old parts of our brains in control of our fear responses is a good thing. If a legion of escaped half-lion, half-ninja warriors were to fall through the ceiling and surround you - with the sole mission of converting your fine flesh into thin sandwich-ready slices - do you want the burden of consciously deciding how fast to increase your heart, or which muscles to fire first to get your legs moving so you can run away? Your conscious mind cannot work fast enough to do these things in the small amount of time you'd have to survive. It's good that fear responses are controlled by the subconscious parts of your minds, since those are the only parts with fast enough wires to do anything useful when real danger happens.

The lizard brain serves a purpose when we are in big-time trouble; however, for the most part, our lives are pretty darn safe, and quite often, the lizard brain ends up holding us back.

Rather than seeing change as an indictment on what you've done in the past, see change as an opportunity to do today what others won't, so tomorrow you can accomplish what others can't.

As a parent or teacher, my ego takes pride in the fact that I am always doing my best with the information I have today. If I gain some kind of new information that rattles my cage, and throws my parenting or pedagogy for a loop, then I have to ask myself, Am I ignoring this information at my own peril? at my daughter's peril? at my students' peril?

Look, not all change is good. Change for the sake of change is no better than tradition for the sake of tradition. Change may seem scary. But blindly following the status quo that has no relationship with reality may be even scarier.

Always be mindful of change and tradition. And if the lizard brain barks, be conscious of it - unless there are ninjas threatening your very existence, it's presence needs to be tamed.

The problem with infinity

In his book The Dip, Seth Godin writes, "the problem with infinity is that there's too much of it." He ends up talking mostly about business and markets, but his point is not lost on education.

The trouble with focusing on content as the primary role of education is that there is an infinite amount of stuff to know.

If teachers are suppose to the be sage on the stage, they might never have time to get off the stage.

If teachers are suppose to be the jugs and the kids are the mugs, the teachers might never notice that their jugs are bottomless and the kids' mugs are already overflowing.

If teachers are to chalk and talk, they may only stop talking because they are waiting for their turn to talk again.

Rigorous and rigid curriculums that are bloated with content is used to rationalize all kinds of horrible pedagogy such as horrendous loads of homework to sit-and-get-regurgitate-and-forget lessons. We cover curriculum at break-neck lightning speeds so that we can say that we covered while we really have no idea whether we've uncovered anything for the kids.

I'm not saying content isn't important, but for the most part, school gets curriculum wrong. You can't demand teachers to dispense an infinite amount of material and then hold them accountable for reducing it all to a finite score.

Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson offer this perspective on planning in their book Rework:

Why don't we just call plans what they really are: guesses. Start referring to your business plans as business guesses, your financial plans as financial guesses, and your strategic plans as strategic guesses. Now y ou can stop worrying abou them as much. They just aren't worth the stress.


When you turn guesses into plans, you enter a danger zone. Plans let the past drive the future. They put blinders on you. "This is where we're going because, well, that's where we said we were going." And that's the problem: plans are inconsistent with improvization.


And  you have to be able to improvise. You have to be able to pick up opportunities that come along. Sometimes you need to say, "We're going in a new direction because that's what makes sense today."


The timing of long-range plans is screwed up too. You have the most information when you're doing something, not before you've done it. Yet when do you write a plan? Usually it's before you've even begun. That's the worst time to make a big decision.


Now this isn't to say you shouldn't think about the future or contemplate how you might attack upcoming obstacles. That's a worthwhile exercise. Just don't feel you to write it down or obsess about it. If you write a big plan, you'll most likely never look at it anyway. Plans more than a few pages long just wind up as fossils in your file cabinet.


Give up on the guesswork. Decide what you're going to do this week, not this year. Figure out the next most important thing and do that. Make decisions right before you do something, not far in advance.


It's OK to wing it. Just get on the plane and go. You can pick up a nicer shirt, shaving cream, and a toothbrush once you get there.


Working without a plan may seem scary. But blindly following a plan that has no relationship with reality is even scarier.

On the record, teachers are bullied into saying that they teach every single outcome that their state or province dictates. Afterall, if they admitted otherwise, they run the risk of being tossed out on their ear. But off the record, over an ice-cold beer, teachers will likely say that they don't get to everything because they just can't. There is too much.

And yet, there are some teachers who will stand stead-fast and recite their allegiance to their curriculums. To these teachers I say, wouldn't you like a little more autonomy? To be trusted a little bit more? A little more time and opportunity to explore the things you and your students would like to explore? In the end, all I am advocating for is more trust and autonomy for teachers.

This is why the very best teachers spend everyday of their lives subverting or ignoring curriculum. And they do so because it is in the best interests of their students.

The Folly of Chasing perfect

I want to make the case that perfect is not only unattainable, but it is not even a desirable outcome because it is ultimately a sabateur of learning.

As a classroom teacher, I can attest to the debilitating effects of success. Someone who has a healthy and resilient attitude towards failure can learn a lot from their mistakes, while sometimes, ironically, it is our successes that can be paralyzing. I say paralyzing because if the point of school or work is to show how good you are, and you achieve that success, why would you risk making changes to your winning recipe?

The truth is successful people know that yesterday's solutions rarely solve tomorrow's problems; because of this, successful people are always creating and recreating themeselves. But does this creating and recreating mean that these successful people are striving for perfection?

Perfection is a dangerous thing to pursue. There is a big difference between focusing on improvement and growth rather than focusing on showing off or not looking dumb.

In Linchpin, Seth Godin examines how the pursuit of perfect is too often bastardized into mistake avoidance:

How many of your coworkers spend all day in search of perfect? 

Or, more accurately, spend all day trying to avoid making a mistake? 

These are very different things. Defect-free is what people are often in search of. Meeting spec. Blameless.

We've been trained since first grade to avoid mistakes. The goal of any test, after all, is to get 100 percent. No mistakes. Get nothing wrong and you get an A, right?

 Read someone's resume, and discover twenty years of extraordinary exploites and one typo. Which are you going to mention first?

We hire for perfect, we manage for perfect, we measure for perfect, and we reward for perfect.

So why are we surprised  that people spend their precious minutes of self-directed, focused work time trying to achieve perfect?

The problem is simple: Art is never defect-free. Things that are remarkable never meet spec, because that would make them standardized, not worth talking about.

Scott Berkun, author of Confessions of a Public Speaker offers his thoughts on avoiding perfection when he practices his public speaking skills:

And when I say I practice, I mean I stand up at my desk, imagine an audience around me, and present exactly as if it were the real thing. If I plan to do something in the presentation, I practice it. But I don't practice to make perfect, and I don't memorize. If I did either, I'd sound like a robot, or worse, like a person trying very hard to say things in an exact, specific, and entirely unnatural style, which people can spot a mile away. My intent is simply to know my material so well that I'm very comfortable with it. Confidence, not perfection, is the goal.

Even as a professional speaker, Berkun can rationalize how perfection is not only something unworthy of striving for, but it isn't even desirable. Godin might say Berkun's artfulness could be found in his ability to inspire wisdom by weaving a witty tale . And yet, there would be something wholly and entirely inaccurate with saying Burken's speaking skills are 'perfect'.

Let me be clear, I'm not calling him perfect or imperfect - I don't mean to judge at all - rather, I am saying the term perfect is a fraudulant fabrication that serves no purpose when describing someone's knowledge, skills or attitudes.

Focusing on perfection cheapens learning and forces us to think in linear terms. As if there were two endpoints - the start and the end - and if we just do our homework, and study for the test, we will one day cross the learning finish line. Thinking in this way takes educational phrases such as "life-long learning" and turns them into punch lines.

If we really believe in "life-long learning" then we have to think of learning as an asymptote rather than something linear. We have to model learning as a journey rather than a destination; however, it's hard to convince kids to focus on their learning rather than their achievement as long as teachers act like giant grade spewing Pez dispensers.

In his book The School Our Children Deserve and article The Costs of Overemphasizing Achievement, Alfie Kohn offers this indictment of overemphasizing achievement and 'perfection':

No one succeeds all the time, and no one can learn very effectively without making mistakes and bumping up against his or her limits. It’s important, therefore, to encourage a healthy and resilient attitude toward failure. As a rule, that is exactly what students tend to have if their main goal is to learn: When they do something incorrectly, they see the result as useful information. They figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.


Not so for the kids who believe (often because they have been explicitly told) that the point is to succeed--or even to do better than everyone else. They seem to be fine as long as they are succeeding, but as soon as they hit a bump they may regard themselves as failures and act as though they’re helpless to do anything about it. Even a momentary stumble can seem to cancel out all their past successes. When the point isn’t to figure things out but to prove how good you are, it’s often hard to cope with being less than good.

Consider the student who becomes frantic when he gets a 92 instead of his usual 100. We usually see this as a problem with the individual and conclude that such students are just too hard on themselves. But the "what I’m doing" versus "how well I’m doing" distinction can give us a new lens through which to see what is going on here. It may be the systemic demand for high achievement that led him to become debilitated when he failed, even if the failure is only relative.

The important point isn’t what level of performance qualifies as failure (a 92 versus a 40, say). It’s the perceived pressure not to fail, which can have a particularly harmful impact on high-achieving and high-ability students. Thus, to reassure such a student that "a 92 is still very good" or that we’re sure he’ll "do better next time" doesn’t just miss the point; it makes things worse by underscoring yet again that the point of school isn’t to explore ideas, it’s to triumph.

The day's of selling perfection through grading as education's snake-oil has run its course. We have to stop selling learning as this thing we can measure on a scale from zero to one-hundred. It's not a letter or a check mark. It can't be bar-graphed or averaged; rather it might be said that proficiency is sitting on top of a mountain while expertise is chasing the horizon.

Because the consequences of overemphasizing achievement and pursuing perfection are too costly to endure, we have to see perfection for what it really is - a fraudulant fabrication that serves no purpose in encouraging students to focus on their learning.

Stop waiting to be told what to do

In his recent book Linchpin, Seth Godin makes a number of stinging criticisms towards apathy:

How was it possible to brainwash billions of people to bury their genius, to give up their dreams, and to buy into the idea of being merely an employee in a factory, following instructions?

Part of it was economic, no doubt about it. Factory work offered average people with small dreams a chance to make a significant change in their standard of living. As a bonus this new wealth came with a pension, job security, and even health insurance.

But I don't believe that this was enough to explain the massive embrace of a different way of life. The key piece of leverage was this promise: follow these instructions and you don't have to think. Do your job and you don't have to be responsible for decisions. Most of all, you don't have to bring your genius to work.

In every corporation in every country in the world, people are waiting to be told what to do. Sure, many of us pretend that we'd love to have control and authority and to bring our humanity to work. But given half a chance, we give it up, in a heartbeat.

Like scared civilians eager to do whatever a despot tells them, we give up our freedoms and responsibilities in exchange for the certainty that comes from being told what to do.

Today's standardized testing craze has stripped teachers of their professionalism. More and more standardization in education says one thing to teachers: We don't trust you!

Teachers need to stand up and take back their classrooms, their assessments and their curriculums. Too many teachers go from day to day too scared to speak up against things like content-bloated curriculums and externally prescribed assessments that are poorly constructed and poorly assessed.

Why don't teachers speak up and advocate for their profession?

For the most part, they have been bullied into a sickly form of apathy. Too many see the opportunity of 'having a place at the table' that they are scared to speak up and advocate for good learning and good teaching in fear of losing that seat at the table. But at what cost will we continue to pay to participate in a pseudo-negotiations with policy makers who are pedagogically even further removed from the classroom than they are geographically.

Is this kind of change possible? Well Alfie Kohn offers this:

If we simply reconcile to the status quo and spend all our time getting out children to accomodate themselves to it and play the game, then nothing will change and they will have to do the same with their children. As someone once said, realism corrupts; absolute realism corrupts absolutely.

It's probably very true that people don't necessarily resist change but they do resist being changed. Because of this, I'm not really interested in changing your mind about anything - but I am interested in encouraging you to think about all this.


While writing this article, Ric Murry made me think of a way we can make school a better place when he tweeted a gem:

You have to convince the kids who hate school to become teachers if you want it to change.

What could you do starting tomorrow that would advocate for the kind of progressive educational reform that our children need?

What could you do starting right now to encourage a kid who hates school to become a teacher and make a difference?

Taylor Mali is a joke

I don't disagree with Seth Godin often. I think he gets most things bang on, but words can't express how disapointed I was when I saw Taylor Mali make Seth's Blog.

Let's take a look at Taylor Mali's little poem:

"I can make kids work harder" - Kids don't work, they learn. Making education metaphorical with business is precisely what has gotten us in the mess we are in today. Policy makers that are pedagogically further removed from the classroom than they are geographically are responsible for too much of what is wrong with school today.

"I can make a C- feel like a congressional medal of honor, and I can make an A- feel like a slap in the face." Of course you can, Taylor. This is true because grades can only ever be experienced by children as a reward or punishment. Do you really want to take credit for that? Extrinsically manipulating children to coerce them to learn with carrots and sticks is hardly something to brag about. You're a bully.

"How dare you waste my time!" That sounds awfully conditional, Taylor. You realize that kids don't need their teacher to be a judge-in-waiting that they must learn to keep their distance from, right? You realize that what they really need is a teacher who will unconditionally accept them for who they are, right? Right?

"I make kids sit through study hall for 40 minutes in absolute silence." Learning is a social exercise - it isn't often that we learn best in isolation - and in the real world collaboration is not cheating. Beyond that, what are they studying for? The state-mandated, high-stakes standardized test? Taylor, are you really proud of wasting 40 minutes of study time when your students could have been doing real learning?

"No you may not work in groups?" Why not, Taylor? How will children learn to collaborate if you arbitrarily decide they can't. And then when you do provide them with the privilege of working together, and they screw it up, you'll blame them because they don't know how to work together. Be honest, Taylor, the quiet classroom is more for you than it is for them. Cui bono?.

"No you may not ask me a question." Again, why not, Taylor? Are you their teacher who is there to guide them and coach them to better learning or are you just a supervisor? The more I listen to you, the more I believe it is the latter.

"No you may not go to the bathroom." Taylor, as an adult, when was the last time you had to even ask to go the bathroom? And as an adult, when was the last time you were told that you couldn't go? And, as an adult, if you were told 'no', what would be your reaction?

"You're bored and you don't really have to go to the bathroom." Taylor, I'll give you 3 guesses why they are bored. I'll give you a hint. It has something to do with that 40 minutes of solitary confinement you love so much.

"I make parents tremble in fear when I call home." I have no idea how this could possibly be a good thing. EVER. Shameful.

"To the biggest bully in the class, he said..." Was this boy speaking to you, Taylor?

"I make kids wonder." No Taylor, at best you make them want to wander. As in wander out of your classroom because you can't make someone do anything and make them like it.

"I make them apologize." Yes, you made them say the word 'sorry', but 'sorry' isn't a word. It's a feeling. I doubt you were ever able to make someone feel sorry... in a good way.

"I make the write, write, write. I make them read." If they could spot a comma splice or a Shakespeare quote from a block away, but they swear to God they'll never pick up a pen or book again, what have you accomplished? Where there's interest, achievement follows. Where there's disinterest, boredom and misbehavior sets in. Montaigne once wrote if students lack "appetite and affection" for learning, they become little more than "asses loaded with books."

"I make them spell..." Sounds like you make your kids sit down for a spell. It also sounds like the real choice you give kids is that we either let them use invented spelling or we don't let them write at all. Wow, how honorable of you.

We can't test our way to a better education, nor can we bully kids to better learning, while our fixation on quantity and control continue to do a massive disservice for our children.

I hope you see Taylor Mali as the joke he really is. And Seth, I hope you can see it too.