Jeff Johnson's Xerox Education

This was written by Zander Sherman who is the author of The Curiosity of School.

By Zander Sherman

Should teachers be evaluated every five years? Alberta’s education minister, Jeff Johnson, and his Task Force for Teaching Excellence think so. 

Minister Johnson’s committee, created last September, has argued that quinquennial evaluations will improve teacher quality, giving administrators scientific proof of competency and enabling them to decide which teachers should keep their jobs and which should have their certificates torn in half.

It’s fitting that Minister Johnson used to work at Xerox. His Task Force seems to believe that Alberta’s 40,000 teachers are all the same, and thus that uniform evaluations of their performance is a valid and reasonable form of assessment. This belief is wrong for the same reason that standardized tests are wrong: People are different. They learn differently.

But more significantly, evaluations every five years would denigrate the teaching profession, reducing educators to the level of factory foremen. With the constant stress of impending assessment, teachers would adhere to the mandates established by the province, teaching only the material and using only the methods that would reward them monetarily.

Minister Johnson, of all people, should know that quality deteriorates with each iteration. The more you test teachers, the worse they will become.

The report was published on May 5. Since then, we've heard from unions (predictably outraged), the Minister (predictably boilerplate), and the general public (predictably confused). What these groups have in common is their treatment of the proposal as a legitimate piece of education reform. But each of the report's 25 recommendations, as evinced in its 94 commissioned pages, are actually thinly disguised economic policy.

That’s because “excellence,” as in the quality of classroom instruction, is being defined in capitalistic terms. On page 17—the only page that defines the very word that comprises the Task Force’s name—we learn that an excellent teacher is one who impacts their students’ test scores, therefore their future earning potential. It warrants mentioning that this definition is phrased partially in parenthesis, and only after the word “excellence” or a derivation appears several dozen times.

What I get from this is that the Task Force thinks the ideal teacher is one who is best able to conform to the provincial goal of training human capital. The authors of the report have taken this position with the evident belief that it’s so uncontentious and commonly held that it barely warrants explanation. Of course a good teacher is one who can help their students get the highest marks. Of course a good student is one who earns the most money once they enter the workforce.

But doesn't a more natural and broader definition of “excellence” strike notes of originality and uniqueness? Wouldn't we intuitively describe an “excellent teacher” as someone who breaks rules and exceeds expectations rather than someone who conforms to a common goal? Isn't an excellent teacher one who inspires us to become more interested in the world around us, as opposed to one who possesses the singular ability to make us rich?

If the only point in going to school is to get a job, teachers are more like bosses than educators, and students are more like employees-in-training than lovers of wisdom, as is the tradition. Aside from the patent falseness of this scenario somehow involving “mastery” or “excellence” in teaching, it represents a stunningly narrow epistemological view that would seem to imply that knowledge has no internal worth, only external value. We can envision the oligarchical society that this would lead to, where wealth is commensurate with ignorance.

So the proposal is economic policy masquerading as education reform, but even here it fails. That’s because, in education as in economics, it takes value to give something worth. Say that capital is the point of learning, and students wouldn't have the knowledge needed to innovate the ideas and products that make the most money. “Educated labour” would be neither educated nor valuable. A proposal designed to enrich students would actually impoverish them.

It’s a perversion that we might call a Xerox education: The Ministry dictates instead of supports, teachers train instead of educate, and students arrive at the world of work only to discover that their degrees aren't worth the paper they were printed on.

One of the best videos on education reform

Take less than 15 minutes and watch this video on education reform and the landscape of assessment in schools.

It's that good.

Transferring Teachers

Imagine this:

• You are a progressive and innovative teacher who engages students.

• You have worked hard to become very knowledgeable about how children learn and in order to meet all of their needs, you understand that you can't pretend that all students have the same needs.

• You have shifted away from believing that curriculum is something that is designed, laminated and mailed to the school by distant authorities to believing that curriculum is something that is co-constructed and negotiated between teachers and students in the classroom.

• Rather than doing things to students to get short-term compliance, you work with them to nurture long term engagement. 

• Your classroom is grounded in a culture of learning -- not a culture of testsandgrades.

• You understand that real learning can not be reduced to numbers, so you have substituted grades with informative feedback that allows the students to see what they've done well and what they can do to improve. Even though the most important things may not be quantifiable, they can always be observed and described.

• You understand that sixty years of research tells us that we don't internalize knowledge by simply being told to do so. Real learning is constructed from the inside while interacting with others, and that's why your students spend most of their class time on project-based-learning and performance assessments that are collected in learning portfolios.

• You understand that the real purpose of a Professional Learning Community should be about learning and not about standardization.

Now imagine this:

• You are approached by your grade-level or subject department head or a teaching colleague and they are concerned that you are not giving the same worksheets, textbook assignments, quizzes and multiple choice tests on the same days in the same manner as the rest of the school or school division.

• You are "asked" to meet with your administration and they are concerned that you are not a "team player" and that you are not "collaborating" with your Professional Learning Committee. 

• You explain in detail how and why you are doing things differently. You show how your teaching is grounded in evidence and research, and that you are getting results via student engagement.

• You are told by your principal that your teaching assignment is changing next year. Instead of teaching courses that match your expertise and passion, you are teaching something that you have little to no expertise or passion. 

• A year later, your administration observes that for some reason you appear unhappy so they suggest you transfer. When you hesitate at the "offer", your administration reminds you that you really don't have a say in a transfer.

Are there good and bad teachers? Yes. But let's not pretend we can agree on who is good and who is bad. There is no agreement on what constitutes good teaching.

Some people complain that it's nearly impossible to get rid of bad teachers, and there might be some truth to it -- but I find it sadly ironic that too often we treat good teachers so poorly that they leave. If we talked about making good teachers even half as much as we talk about firing bad ones, we would probably get somewhere.

Keep in mind that the tactics used in the example above by administration can be used on any teacher regardless of their quality. Transferring a teacher like this can have two goals:

1. This is an effective way of getting rid of lazy, incompetent teachers who refuse to engage competently and professionally with students, parents, colleagues and administrators (of course, it doesn't actually get rid of them, it just makes them someone else's problem) -- but it can also be an effective way of getting rid of outspoken teachers who refuse to mindlessly comply with every top-down, drive-by directive dispensed by distant authorities who are as geographically distanced from the classroom as they are pedagogically.

2. By making an example of these teachers, administration can keep other teachers compliant.

Sometimes transfers are a breath of fresh air that allows a teacher to re-energize. But sometimes the threat of a transfer can be an instrument of control between the powerful and powerless -- that's why sometimes teacher transfers have less to do with learning and teaching and more to do with compliance, punishment and power.

Innovation can be intimidating because it often involves ambiguity and change -- but ambiguity and change can often challenge competence which is why some of the most competent people can sometimes be the largest obstacles to change.

It takes courageous leadership to empower teachers to engage students in progressive and alternative ways, but that means we have to stop using the threat of a transfer over teachers to merely get them to do whatever we want. Changing and improving school will only happen if the people most responsible for implementing changes are actively engaged in the process.

Giving teacher's permission to make school different and better is not the same as telling teachers to just do what they are told, and you can't expect teachers to be innovative and progressive as long as the threat of a transfer looms over them like a guillotine.

The problem with getting teachers used to simply doing what they are told is that they might get used to doing only what they are told.

If teachers resign themselves to being nothing more than agents of the state for delivering top-down mandated, prefabricated, content-bloated, scripted curriculums then it makes sense to do whatever it takes to manipulate, bribe, threaten, bully, harass kids into doing whatever it is we want them to do. If this is our perspective, then as long as the kids do what we want, even begrudgingly, we consider compliance our mandate. And if this is how we want to treat children, then I guess it makes sense to treat teachers this way too.

But...

...if teachers see their responsibility as engaging every learner in a personalized journey in discovering and constructing their passion, we come to see authentic engagement as infinitely more important than compliance. And if this is how we want to treat children, then I guess it makes sense to treat teachers this way, too.

Ultimately the best teachers come to see school not as something done to kids, but something done by them and with them. Likewise, the best administrators and even policy-makers see school reform not as something done to teachers, but something done by them and with them.

Standardization vs. Professionalization

In her post Standardization vs. Professionalization, Ariel Sacks writes:

I believe the drama of the current moment in education is a conflict between two opposing forces attempting to take the country's education system in two different directions.

On one side, you have the movement toward standardization--of curriculum, standards, assessments, teaching methods, and ultimately, students. On this side, testing is the way forward. It's a way to apparently control a multitude of factors that affect teaching and learning. It's a way to make teaching a simple matter of learning techniques to get results. It implies that success looks the same for every child, that we can count on "if...then..." scenarios to work every time, and that the arts have no value.

The movement toward standardization means lots of money is needed to fund the creation and administration of more tests, the development of test preparation materials and stronger data tracking systems. These endeavors add up to a booming industry funded by our tax money. This movement also means less money and time is needed to prepare, support and retain quality, professional teachers, since most curriculum and assessment decisions are made without teacher input and creativity.

On the other side, you have a powerful movement working to create a real teaching profession, something we've never really had, due in large part to sexism inherent in the way the teacher's job has historically been structured. Teachers are taking on more leadership at all levels of the educational system, revealing the complexity of teaching and child development, and bridging the huge divide between the ed policy world and the classroom. Parents are speaking up about the value of their childrens' teachers and the diverse needs of their children.

Lately there are forceful attempts by the standardization movement to take control of the professionalization of teaching, by defining great teaching as that which causes the greatest rise in student standardized test scores. Will professionals and taxpayers allow this false idea to guide the education of America's children?

Genuine Accountability

This was written by Lynn Stoddard. It first appeared here.

It is wrong to hold teachers accountable with achievement testing for something that is impossible to do. It is impossible to make students alike in knowledge and skills. Students cannot be manufactured like automobiles or airplanes. Every person was born to be unique and different from all others.

What would happen if teachers were held accountable for doing things that are possible — like helping students develop their unique talents? What would happen if teachers were held responsible for stimulating student curiosity, developing the power to ask penetrating questions and to fall in love with learning? A better way to teach reading is to help students develop an insatiable curiosity about something.

When teachers and parents unite to help students grow in developing genuine inquiry and identity, students achieve more in basic skills, not all at the same time, but each one at his or her own time, pace and level.

If we stop trying to standardize students, but do the opposite — develop positive human diversity, we will be on the threshold of a revolution in public education. Why not start now? Why not Utah?

Lynn Stoddard
Farmington

Dysfunctional PLCs

When I taught middle school, I was a part of what we called "Team 8" which was where all the grade 8 teachers would come together on Monday morning to discuss the coming week and our students' needs. There were usually 4 or 5 of us. I taught half the kids science and language arts while someone else taught the other half. There was usually one math teacher for all 4 classes and two social teachers with two classes each.

When I taught grade 6 exclusively, I taught half of the grade 6s all their core subjects while my grade-level partner taught the other half. We were a two-man team that met daily to discuss our students and our teaching.

Now I teach at a children's psychiatric assessment unit where I'm the only teacher. I work with a multi-disciplinary team of nurses, doctors, recreation therapists, phycologists and social workers. I am in daily contact with my team to discuss our students' special needs.

As I enter my 12th year of teaching, these are the three teaching environments that I have had the pleasure of working in, and in each case I have had the opportunity to be a part of a work environment filled with professionals who were committed to help children. In each environment, efforts were made to help nurture a culture of collaboration. We were there to support each other.

But I have come to see a disturbing trend among some teachers' work environments. I've come to hear how some teachers feel like prisoners to their Professional Learning Communities.

Here's what I mean:

I have always been fortunate enough to be a part of a team where we respected each other enough to know that our instructional and assessment practices would differ based on our individual students' needs. But not all teachers are afforded this professional autonomy. In fact, for too many teachers the P in PLC doesn't seem to stand for Professional or Personal.

Some PLCs, grade level teams or subject departments operate in a manner that places standardization as their primary function. Some PLCs meet for no other reason than to arrive at a "consensus" for how all the teachers will instruct and assess their students. A kind of pseudo-democracy driven by majority rules is enforced to justify a consistent (read: standardized), one-size-fits-all approach to teaching and learning.

Some claim that the strength of this approach is to decrease the likelihood that a student or parent might complain about one teacher or favor another. Such complaints can be easily tossed aside because it is assumed that two different students with two different teachers are receiving an identical experience. Complaints simply aren't registered because the PLC makes each teacher interchangeable. In this scenario, fair and equal become the same thing.

But this is a farce.

We all know that each student's classroom experiences often hinge on their teacher's pedagogical beliefs. Even if two teachers are mandated to use the same course outline, grading scheme, disciplinary policy, seating arrangement, textbook and final exam, these two teachers will likely still offer two different learning experiences for their students.

This is unavoidably true because these two teachers will teach different students.

I'm all for teachers coming together to collaborate in an effort to improve, but that's not the same as having teachers come together to vote on their instructional and assessment practices. The idea that a teacher could some how meet each of their individual students' needs by voting with a committee of teachers, who may not even teach the same students, is a relic of the factory model of school.

In this system, the children are treated as if they were interchangeable widgets -- cogs in a machine where the machine's needs trump the needs of the learners' needs.

There's a lot wrong with a PLC that standardizes teaching and learning, but perhaps at the heart of the problem is a misguided belief that in order to provide an excellent education for all children, all children must get the same education. Ultimately, these dysfunctional PLCs fail because we know that we can't meet the needs of all learners by pretending all learners have the same needs.

Standardization is stifling

Because fair isn't always equal, we can have high standards without standardization. We don't all need to be doing the same thing the same way to be successful. For me, this picture is the definitive reason why it's important to remember that all children have unique needs and thus need to be treated as an individual.

A system smothered in standardization has convinced some that they need permission to personalize learning for kids. Look at that little girl - should we need permission to supply her those legs? Should that man need permission to run with her? Standardization is about meeting the system's needs, even if it means ignoring an individual's needs.

Standardization alienates and marginalizes the people who need us the most. Personalization and differentiation promotes diversity. In short, standardization is dehumanizing.

We are all different and we are all better for it.

Diversity makes us stronger.

Common Assessment = Undifferentiated Assessment

Here is a guest post by Dave Martin. He tweets here and blogs a lot about math here.

by Dave Martin

I would like to challenge the idea of common assessment. Not just common throughout a department but common even in a single classroom. From this time further I will refer to these assessments as their true name “Standardized Assessments”. The definition of a standardized assessment is:

a test that is administered and scored in a consistent, or "standard", manner. Standardized tests are designed in such a way that the questions, conditions for administering, scoring procedures, and interpretations are consistent.

Also, I refer to these as standardized assessments as they are designed in such a way the class average should fall in a “reasonable” zone. This zone may differ from teacher to teacher and from class to class but this underlying bell curve does exist. I have heard of meetings where discussions such as “The average was low, so the test should be made easier” or “The average was too high, so we need to increase the difficulty” have been had. This saddens me as we are requiring students to fail such that others can feel success.

Since by the definition and the manner these assessments are designed, usually, they must fall on a specific day, common to all teachers of the same course, and also consist of some mixture of the following:

· MC 5-10 questions
· NR 3-5 questions
· WR 2-5 questions with bullets

Usually the test days, and requirements are decided before the first day of schoolI have asked why do teachers give common assessment? I will provide the two top reasons I heard, and then my counter-argument.

1) Standardized assessment allows for fair and equal assessment practices between the same courses throughout the school.

Counter: What is fair is not always equal and what is equal isn’t always fair. If we truly want equal assessment, then should we not require all students to write with the same hand, take off their glasses, set the temperature in all the rooms to be the same, and have all students write with the same type of pencil? I know this sounds absurd, but where does the fair and equal practice stop? Each and every student, in my class, has a different set of needs and abilities yet these exams will force each student to be put through the same hole. Alberta Education recently, wrote:

Differentiated assessment means selecting tools and strategies to provide each student with the best opportunity to demonstrate his or her learning. As you get to know your students, and as student differences emerge, assessment naturally becomes more differentiated, because its purpose is to meet students where they are and to coach them to the next step. In this way, assessment and instruction continue to support and inform each other.

By making these decisions before ever “knowing my students” how is one to decide which would be the “best opportunity for each student to demonstrate his or her learning”? I do not see standardized assessment as a fair and equal practice at all.

2) Standardized assessment allows for fair and equal instructional practices between courses throughout the school.

Counter: This seems like the standardized assessment is more assessing the teacher than the student now. Even if two students, in two different classes, receive the same mark this does not guarantee the same instruction has been given. One teacher could be “teaching to the test” and involving daily test prep activities while the other is implementing quality instruction and critical thinking.

Now, the problems I see with common assessment:

First and foremost: It is the duty and responsibility of the classroom teacher to determine how and when to assess each student. I am confused and distraught when people, outside the class, control the assessment strategies, without even knowing the individual students they are impacting.

Alberta Education’s ideas are:

Differentiating assessment involves rethinking the standard practice of having all students do the same assessment tasks at the same time, regardless of their individual learning needs or the learning they have already demonstrated. Rather, in this new paradigm, teachers customize the selection and use of assessment information to reflect each student’s highest level of achievement.

By having standardized exams, we are going against the research and knowledge of our government. Also, it should be the freedom of the teacher to decide, and indeed, the freedom of each student to decide how and when they will be assessed on their knowledge. Of course we all know that some people employed as teachers do not do a good job, but by forcing everyone to assess, and ultimately, teach the same way it does not improve these “bad teachers” – but actually hobbles the good ones.

Learning Patience

In China they say someone plants the Giant Bamboo seed.

In that first year someone waters it, fertilizes it, cares for it -- and nothing happens.

In the second year someone waters it, fertilizes it, cares for it -- and nothing happens.

In the third years someone waters it, fertilizes it, cares for it -- and nothing happens.

Sometime in that fourth year, someone waters it, fertilizes it, and cares for it -- and it suddenly shoots up 25 feet tall.

I believe this anecdote has a number of implications for education:

• Having high standards is one thing, but standardizing both what and how children will learn with a a fixed pacing schedule is quite another. Children are not merely widgets that teachers simply assemble at their respective grade-level work stations. Demanding all children to meet a certain standard by a certain "best-before" date defies what we know about how children learn. We shouldn't need research to tell us this.

• Rewarding or punishing teachers based on how a child does in their class in one year makes as much sense as punishing the first year farmer or rewarding the fourth year farmer.

• If we don't trust the farmer to properly seed, water, fertilize and care for the Giant Bamboo then it might make sense to dig up that seed each year and measure its progress. If we don't trust teachers to properly educate students, then it might make sense to constantly or even obsessively measure student growth. If we can imagine how doing this would hinder the growth of the Giant Bamboo, what are we doing to our children when we implement test & punish accountability regimes?
• While some kinds of Bamboo take years to show growth, others take far less time. The same goes for the kids -- ranking, sorting and filtering with tests that act like arbitrary gatekeepers condemn one kind of learner to someone else's definition of success.

The Alberta/Finland Partnership

I was reading an article tittled Testing, Testing by Larry Booi and J.C Couture in albertaviews magazine where education in Alberta and Finland were compared and contrasted.

Here are some highlights:

• In December 2010 an Alberta-Finnish partnership was struck between the Alberta Teachers' Association (ATA), Alberta Education and the Finnish Ministry of Education & Culture.
• "Too many people outside classrooms telling teachers what to do. The Alberta/Finland partnership is transformational in that it's about teachers themselves developing school reform." Dennis Shirley of Boston College.
• If we believe that our overriding task in schools should be to develop the full potential of all of our students, with all of the diversity and differences among them, on thing is clear: we'll only get so far with a system that focuses on standardization, goals that are easily measured through multiple-choice exams and teachers who are essentially technicians. The combination of such a model with unpredictable education funding leaves us vulnerable.
• In addition to being more decentralized and less bureaucratic, Finland puts a higher priority on the early years of child development.
• Finn's core curriculum for the first few years of elementary school is based on learning through play - no the typical North American paradigm of hurrying the child.
• "As we talked more with Finnish educators, I grew to understand their education system is based on relational trust rather than data trust." ATA president Carol Henderson
• What Finns don't do in education runs counter to many assumptions in North America. For example, they don't have any standardized tests in their schools. Instead, they rely on teachers to assess students.
• "The term 'accountability' cannot be found in Finnish education policy discourse. Educational reform principles since the early 1990s - when much of the public sector administration went through decentralization - have relied on building professional responsibilities and encouraging lateral learning among teachers rather than applying administrative accountability policies. Therefore... thematic assessments, reflective self-evaluations and an emphasis on creative learning have established a culture of mutual trust and respect.
• The Finns reject "the North American obsession with sorting kids and ranking schools."
• In Alberta, students take standardized provincial tests in Grades 3, 6, 9 and 12. These assess a very narrow band of learning outcomes and are not only expensive but redundant.
• Finnish elementary students not only don't begin school until age 7, they spend 40 per cent less time every day in formal instruction than do Alberta students.
• "Finland succeeds mainly by "attracting highly qualified teachers with supportive working conditions, strong degrees of professional trust and an inspiring mission of inclusion and creativity." Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley from their book The Fourth Way.
• Above all, educational improvement efforts are focused on the school rather than at the civic or national level.
• "How do they encourage teacher engagement in Finland? They don't. Teaching is the incentive. It is high prestige, higher than doctors, lawyers and architects." Canadian Journalist Rick Salutin
• The training averages from five to seven-and-a-half years and is comparable to other professional degrees. All teachers must have a master's degree and do a thesis.
• "If Alberta relinquished its title as the lowest-taxed province and settled for a tie with BC for lowest tax rate in the country, this would yield $11 billion for education, healthcare, children in poverty and seniors." ATA president Carol Henderson

Education for all

Alfie Kohn writes in his article Debunking the Case for National Standards:

Are all kids entitled to a great education? Of course. But that doesn’t mean all kids should get the same education. High standards don’t require common standards. Uniformity is not the same thing as excellence – or equity. (In fact, one-size-fits-all demands may offer the illusion of fairness, setting back the cause of genuine equity.) To acknowledge these simple truths is to watch the rationale for national standards – or uniform state standards -- collapse into a heap of intellectual rubble.

Stanford University's Elliot Eisner adds:

The kind of schools we need would not hold as an ideal that all students get to the same destinations at the same time. They would embrace the idea that good schools increase the variance in student performance and at the same time escalate the mean.

In The Myth of Standardized Tests, the authors paraphrase Eisner:

That's a professional way of saying that we ought to  become more different, rather than more alike, as we grow to physical and intellectual maturity. More different, yet we all grow.

Mara Sapon-Shevin, the author of Widening the Circle, adds:

What we teach people about human variation as children will have a profound effect on their understanding of difference in the future and their abilities to connect and relate to people who are different from them.

Mara Sapon-Shevin goes on to say what I believe is to be the whole point of this post:

It seems obvious to say that we can understand and value differences only if we are surrounded by them.

Standardized inequality

What could be be more inequitable than expecting everyone to learn the same things, to the same level of competence, in the same amount of time?

Common and standardization are not the same thing

I once had someone try and convince me that top-down mandated, standardized exams, that were made by only a few, but forced upon the many, were not in fact standardized exams - rather they wanted me to believe, so very badly, that they were merely common exams.

The idea being that if we simply called them common, and not standardized, then the exams would be inherently less objectionable. I mean who can argue with something as warm and fuzzy as common?

In my heart, I knew they were standardized but I struggled to put what I knew to be true into words... until now. John Spencer's video and post titled Suffocating in Standardization made the distinction between standardization and common crystal clear.

These "common" exams weren't common by John's definition. There was nothing democratic about how these exams were being "shared". I wasn't free to take it, change it, and or trash it. I had no choice over whether they were appropriate for my students. There was nothing democratic or fair about these "common" exams.

The only thing common about these exams was that we were all forced to do them. Because political power was required to ensure mandated uniformity, these exams were by definition standardized.

At the heart of the illusion of standardization is a deeply misguided belief that providing a great education to all children requires all kids to get the same education. Until we understand that we can not provide learners with their needs by pretending that everyone has the same needs, standardization will continue to look like the solution rather than the problem it really is.

Illusion of standardization

The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.

Socrates

When "collaboration" is really code for standardization, professional development becomes nothing more than control over actions. 

Just like how mandated sentences strips judgement from judges, so too does standardization deny teachers the ability to teach. Maja Wilson puts it this way:

Mandating practices in the effort to improve teaching paradoxically creates the kind of environment that undermines good teaching. [Standardization] contributes to an environment that actually stunts teachers' ability to make good decisions in the classroom and obscures bad teaching with its illusion of uniformity.

It's not easy to object to standardization; I know a lot of good teachers who believe consistency is a good thing...

While its true that standardization provides us with consistency, it tends to act less like a floor and more like a ceiling. In other words, standardization is attractive because it offers a kind of guarantee, but that guarantee tends to come at an alarming cost.

Seymour Papert describes with chilling accuracy just how costly the illusion of standardization really is:

It is this freedom of the teacher to decide and, indeed, the freedom of the children to decide, that is most horrifying to the bureaucrats who stand at the head of current education systems. They are worried about how to verify that the teachers are really doing their job properly, how to enforce accountability and maintain quality control. They prefer the kind of curriculum that will lay down, from day to day, from hour to hour, what the teacher should be doing, so that they can keep tabs on it. Of course, every teacher knows this is an illusion. It’s not an effective method of insuring quality. It is only a way to cover ass. Everybody can say, “I did my bit, I did my lesson plan today, I wrote it down in the book.” Nobody can be accused of not doing the job. But this really doesn’t work. What the bureaucrat can verify and measure for quality has nothing to do with getting educational results–those teachers who do good work, who get good results, do it by exercising judgment and doing things in a personal way, often undercover, sometimes even without acknowledging to themselves that they are violating the rules of the system. Of course one must grant that some people employed as teachers do not do a good job. But forcing everyone to teach by the rules does not improve the “bad teachers”– it only hobbles the good ones.

If we are to achieve the kind of wisdom that Socrates spoke of, then we need to understand what standardization does and does not do. We need to understand what we are actually prescribing to when we standardize curriculum and assessment.

Children are not widgets that simply require a better regiment of assembly line workers. Children are not interchangeable cogs that would benefit from simply being treated more like their peers.

We have to stop pretending that we can meet one learners' needs by pretending that all learners have the same needs.

We have to stop pretending that highly prescribed curriculums and standardized testing has anything to do with good teaching and real learning.

Our fixation on quantity and control is doing a massive disservice to our children.

In the context of educating children, a proper definition of terms would have us realize that standardization serves to make the shallowest forms of teaching and superficial learning appear successful.

Fair isn't always equal

When we confuse fairness with equality we marginalize and victimize the very students who need us most.

The only people who gain from such standardization are those who the system had in mind.

What about everyone else?

Public education is for the public - it's for everybody. Standardized testing is by definition exclusionary. See the problem?

Standardization: it will fill you up but with nothing good

I know an awful lot of teachers who see consistency and standardization as a good thing.

It reminds me of the old sports joke where one spectator asks another "what did you think of the officiating?" and the other says "it was consistent... consistently awful... but it was consistent."

You can walk into a McDonald's anywhere in the world, order a meal and be "guaranteed" to get exactly what you expect... it will fill you up, but with nothing good. Sure, you could get by living off this standardized guarantee, but who would want to?

Sir Ken Robinson continues the fast-food metaphor for standardization in his book The Element:

Education is being strangled persistently by the culture of standardized testing. The irony is that these tests are not raising standards except in some very particular areas, and at the expense of most of what really matters in education. 

To get a perspective on this, compare the process of quality assurance in education with those in an entirely different field - catering. In the restaurant business, there are two distinct models of quality assurance. The first is the fast-food model. In this model, the quality of the food is guaranteed, because it's standardized. The fast-food chains specify exactly what should be on the menu in all of their outlets. They specify exactly what should be done in the burger or nuggets, the oil in which they should be fried, the exact bun in which they should be served, how the fries should be made, what should be in the drinks, and exactly how they should be served. They specify how the room should be decorated and what the staff should wear. Everything is standardized. It's often dreadful and bad for you. Some forms of fast food are contributing to the massive explosion of obesity and diabetes across the world. But at least the quality is guaranteed. 

The other model of quality assurance in catering is the Michelin guide. In this model, the guides establish specific criteria for excellence, but they do not say how the particular restaurants should meet these criteria. They don't say what should be on the menu, what the staff should wear, or how the rooms should be decorated. All of that is at the discretion of the individual restaurant to meet them in whatever way they see best. They are then judged not to some impersonal standard, but by the assessment of experts who know what they are looking for and what a great restaurant is actually like. The result is that every Michelin restaurant is terrific. And they are all unique and different from each other.

One of the essential problems for education is that most countries subject their schools to the fast-food model of quality assurance when they should be adopting the Michelin model instead. The future of education is not in standardizing but in customizing; not in promoting groupthink and "de-individuation" but in cultivating the real depth and dynamism of human abilities of every sort.

Just as standardization ensures that a real cook will never be employed by a fast-food chain, education reforms that mandate highly prescribed, content-bloated curriculums and standardized tests are working hard to ensure that real teachers need not work in schools again.

Standardization: cui bono?

Cui bono? Who benefits from standardization?

If we can admit that children are not simply widgets that teachers manufacture in a linear assembly line, then why would we ever prescribe to standardizing the way teachers teach and/or the way students learn? You can't meet one learner's needs by pretending all learners have the same needs.

As far as I can see it, there are two major benefiters to standardization:

Teachers can benefit from standardization. It can be awfully laborious for a teacher to teach 30+ students in 30+ different ways so they can do 30+ unique projects that they have to grade in 30+ ways. Let me be clear: I don't disparage teachers for this. As a classroom teacher, I can fully appreciate the urge to standardize somethings in a classroom - and I can even admit that in small, mindful doses, standardization can make sense and be appropriate. However, small, mindful doses of standardization are hardly the rule.

I'd like to see standardization at the very least be the exception to the rule, and when we do in fact standardize something, let us be honest and be prepared to give full disclosure: standardization is more for the teacher and less for the learner.

Data mongers benefit from standardization. Because accountability has come to be defined as More control for people outside of the classroom over those who are in the classroom, data has become a necessary evil. If schools are to be ran by people who don't even work in the same building as the kids, they need data to drive everyone else's decisions. But if every learner is off gallivanting on their own pursuit for life long learning, indulging in personalized academic exploration while constructing meaning for themselves, how the hell can we compare one kid to another?

I have a radical solution.

How about we drop our obsession for comparing kids, teachers, and schools to other kids, teachers and schools? If we did that, we might end this mania for reducing everything we do in schools to numbers. While I can admit that quantifiable data may have a place in education, let's not pretend a balance actually exists. Rick Ayers aptly describes the predicament we're in:

There is something in a policy discussion that just loves numbers. We need data. No matter if the data are fuzzy, distorting, or simply unusable...Our holy grail is the standardized test, even though these tests have been shown to be laughable in tracking student knowledge, biased towards those with more wealth and cultural capital, and destructive in narrowing and dumbing down the curriculum as schools focus on test prep to avoid closure. Any attempt to describe what happens in good classrooms in a complex way, in a way that captures the human elements, is dismissed as "anecdotal evidence" at best, and at worst, as granola-fuzzy-hippy sentimentality.

If I asked you who should benefit from school - I would hope you would say the learner. If I asked you who benefits from standardization, I defy anyone to look me in the eye and say the learner.

Cui bono?

We need more... standardization?!

True Story:

High school administrators called a meeting with their school's subject department leaders. Recently, students and parents had begun comparing how some teachers were teaching, and the administration were fielding many calls from parents about how different teachers were teaching the same courses in different ways. Some teachers gave different assignments, others gave less quizzes while others others gave more or less homework.

Years ago, the departments had already decided to standardize their final assessments. The reasoning being that every student in the same class, regardless of teacher, should do the same final exam. It seemed only fair, and it solved a lot of problems based on complaints from students and parents about some of the variances in exam format and difficulty (which depended on the teacher).

Because students and parents were now complaining about the differences between the frequency and format of each teacher's assignments, the administration proposed that assignments should be standardized like the assessments.

Of course the teachers were up in arms about the entire suggestion - the idea of standardizing assignments was immediately rejected, and the administrators backed off.

I think this story should teach us two things:

Firstly, administrators who field complaints from parents should redirect parents immediately to the teacher whom they have a concern with. Good administrators know that every teacher teaches and assesses differently and are happy for it. But if the students and parents have a legitimate gripe about a teacher's teaching, then simply forcing all teachers to comply to an arbitrary consistency won't solve anything - the ability for an administrator to dismiss complaints by simply saying, "all teachers here teach that way" is hardly a solution. No administrator worth having as an administrator would ever see this as an acceptable solution. In fact, the real problem isn't that parents are calling; but that the parents aren't calling the teacher directly to have an honest conversation about their child's learning is at the heart of the issue.

Secondly, the teachers disgust for standardized assignments should not be limited to just the assignments. Standardization is driven by mistrust, and needs to be rejected at all levels. Standardization at the global level, is equally as reprehensible as it is at the national, provincial, district or even school level.

If teachers are trusted enough to spend a good chunk of every day instructing, coaching and teaching students in a way that is tailored to the learners' needs, then why aren't teacher trusted to assess their students' based on the learners' personalized needs?

Removing the teachers' and students' voices from deciding how they shall learn is no more or less distrustful and disrespectful than removing their voice from how their learning shall be assessed.

Standardization is not part of the solution; it is part of the problem.

Hollow promises

Making students accountable for test scores works well on a bumper sticker and it allows many politicians to look good by saying that they will not tolerate failure. But it represents a hollow promise. Far from improving education, high- stakes testing marks a major retreat from fairness, from accuracy, from quality, and from equity.

- Sen. Paul Wellstone (1944-2002)

Could you imagine Joel Klein, George Bush, Barrack Obama, Arne Duncan or Michelle Rhee saying anything like this?

In Alberta, Canada, we have a very strong understanding for how foolish the American Education System's obsession with standardized test scores truly is; and yet we still have a very strong test score focus.

Mission statements are cute, but if school districts want to strive for excellence by inspiring learning and nurturing hope in every student, they have to do more than just say it - and they can't simply resign themselves to the way they've always done things.

School districts need to rethink how they define and measure success. In Alberta, we still place far too much emphasis on narrow minded, paper and pencil, multiple choice exams. If we really care about excellence for all - inspiring learning in all - nurturing hope in all - then we need to define and measure success in a less standardized manner. But then that means we need to drop or obsessive need to measure our success in a way that compares one kid or one school to other kids and other schools. If we no longer feel the need to compare then we no longer feel the need to standardize.

If we no longer need to standardize for the purpose of data collections, then we can properly personalize learning in a way that is inspiring and nurturing for all.

Standards and Standardization

I had the good fortune of listening to Sir Ken Robinson speak in Calgary, Alberta. He said many many inspiring things that evening including something to this effect:

"There is nothing wrong with having high standards, but who said that having high standards means everyone has to do the same thing. Having high standards and standardization are not the same."

So if we don't have to standardize in an effort to provide high standards for our children's education, then why is there so much standardization? Alfie Kohn writes about cui bono in his book Punished by Rewards. Cui bono meaning: who benefits?

Standardization rarely is in the best interest of student learning. Instead, standardization most benefits those who wish to collect data that can be analyzed and compared - allowing teachers, students and schools to be 'properly' ranked and sorted.

It's about ranking rather than rating.

I propose that we liberate our children's learning from their standardized prison cells. Personally, the best thing I ever did in order to liberate my students was to abolish grades. Without grades, I no longer felt like every student had to do the same assignment or same test. I didn't need 'data' that was quantifiable nor did I need to compare one student to another.