Human capacity or Human captivity?

Have you noticed how often really young children love to learn?

Have you noticed how often teenagers hate school?

What happens to kids in between the age of 4 and 17?

These questions remind me of an excerpt from Sir Ken Robinson's book The Element:

There is a basic flaw in the way some policymakers have interpreted the idea of going "back to basics" to upgrade educational standards. They look at getting back to basics as a way of reinforcing the old Industrial Revolution-era hierarchy of subjects. They seem to believe that if they feed our children a nationally prescribed menu of reading, writing and arithmetic, we'll be more competitive with the world and more prepared for the future. 

What is catastrophically wrong with this mode of thinking is that it severely underestimates human capacity. We place tremendous significance on standardized tests, we cut funding for what we consider "nonessential" programs, and then we wonder why our children seem unimaginative and uninspired. In these ways, our current education system systematically drains the creativity out of our children.

What's ironic is that school might be less about developing and nourishing human capacity and more about human captivity.

Trivial educational reform

In his book The Element, Sir Ken Robinson urges us to rethink school:

This is especially true in high schools, where school systems base education on the principles of the assembly line and the efficient division of labour. Schools divide the curriculum into specialist segments:"some teachers install math in the students; and others install history. They arrange the day into standard units of time, marked out by the ringing of bells, much like a factory announcing the beginning of the workday and the end of breaks. Students are educated in batches, according to age, as if the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture. They are given standardized tests at set points and are compared with each other before being sent out onto the market.

Too often the changes made over the years to education have been simply trivial. In his book The Red Pencil, Ted Sizer writes:

Most of it is not only recognizable; it is still fully accepted and honored today as a representation of what we call secondary school: a class of twenty or so adolescents gathered by age into grades to learn together a subject both for its content and for the skills embodied in that content taught by a single teacher who is responsible for delivering that material, assigning homework, and assessing each student's performance in a uniform manner, all this proceeding in sequential blocks of time of forty to sixy minutes each in a specialized school building primarily made up of a succession of identical rooms taht are used for six hours for fewer than half the days in a year... This is what school is.

What makes the persistence of this routine even more interesting is that its effectiveness has long been known to be weak, "effectiveness" defined as the students' ultimate resourceful use of the content and skills being studied. Nonetheless, the form of such a "good" school is widely accepted, and today's students assembled in classes... surely have palms as sweaty as mine were. The red pencil has, perhaps, been replaced by the machine-graded standardized test, a trivial difference. Tradition in the framework of schooling has remarkable momentum.

School simply has not changed very much since the turn of the century - and I'm not referring to 1999 to 2000. I would wager Sir Ken Robinson's description of school would ring just as true for my grandfather who was born in 1916 and my father who was born in 1953, as I who was born in 1978.

My greatest fear is that my daughter, who was born in 2008, will understand all too well the system that Sir Ken Robinson describes.

If she responds to the above descriptions of schooling with anything less than shock and awe, we will know we have failed her.

The Culture of Public Education

In their book Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson offer this on culture:

Instant cultures are artificial cultures. They're big bangs made of mission statements, declarations, and rules. They are obvious, ugly and plastic. Artificial culture is paint. Real culture is patina.

You don't create culture. It happens. This is why new companies don't have a culture. Culture is the by-product of consistent behavior If you encourage people to share, then sharing will be built into your culture. If you reward trust, then trust will be built in. If you treat customers right, then treating customers right becomes your culture.

Today's high-stakes test and punish accountability is bastardizing our school's culture. In a queer attempt to count and measure our way to better learning, we are poisoning our classrooms.

Alfie Kohn puts it this way:

A school that is about raising test scores is not a school that is about excellence and love of learning.

Kohn's words are strong and rightfully so. Test scores are a fraudulent fabrication that are fatally undermining education.

Want proof?

Stop giving tests. Stop talking about the results. Stop discussing this 'need' to raise them.

And you will find that learning will persevere. Tests could cease today and learning would prevail tomorrow.

You see, learning is natural. And so can assessment, if done correctly. Let's simplify; two things must happen to conduct summative assessment:

1. Gather

2. Share

What may surprise you is that a teacher need not ever use tests to properly gather nor do they ever need to use grades to share.

In his classic book The Schools Our Children Deserve, Alfie Kohn explains:

There's good reason to think that the best teachers do not rely much on pencil-and-paper tests because they rarely need them to know how their students are doing. Teachers who base their practice on a constructivist theory of learning are always watching and listening. Everything from the kinds of tasks assigned to the way the classroom is organized has been designed to help the teacher know as much as possible about how the students are making sense of things. This kind of informal assessment is continuous, making things like quizzes very nearly superfluous. We might even say that the more a teacher needs formal tests to guage student achievement, the  more something is wrong. (With direct instruction, of course, the teacher is talking more than listening, so traditional exams would be seen as necessary.) As parents, we shouldn't be worried about those who need to give frequent tests because they may have no feel for how their students' minds work.

Kohn then provides this powerful classroom teacher's testimony:

In the real world of learning, tests, and reports and worksheets aren't the most meaningful way to understand a person's growth, they're just convenient ways in a system of schooling that's based on mass produciton... I assess my students by looking at their work, by talking with them, by making informal observations along the way. I don't need any means of appraisal outside my own observations and the student's work, which is demonstration enough of thinking, their growth, their knowledge, and their attitudes over time.

This might all seem quite counter-intuitive. I know it flies in the face of the way I was educated and the pedagogy I practiced at the start of my teaching career, but good teachers understand what Chris Lehmann meant when he spoke at TEDxNYED and said,

What we see with our eyes daily is more important than what students bubble in on one day of the year.

In his book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, Sir Ken Robinson explains further how the public education culture is in trouble:

Most of us can look back to particular teachers who inspired us and changed our lives. These teachers excelled and reached us, but they did this in spite of the basic culture and mindset of public education. There are significant problems with that culture, and I don't see nearly enough improvements. In many systems, the problems are getting worse. This is true just about everywhere...

Children everywhere are under intense pressure to perform at higher and higher levels on a narrow range of standardized tests...

The result is that school systems everywhere inculcate us with a very narrow view of intelligence and capacity and overvalue particular sorts of talent and ability. In doing so, they neglect others that are just as important, and they disregard the relationships between them in sustaining the vitality of our lives and communities. This stratified, one-size-fits-all approach to education marginalizes all of those who do not take naturally to learning this way...

These approaches to education are also stifling some of the most important capacities that young people now need to make their way in the increasingly demanding world of the twenty-first century - the powers of creative thinking. Our systems of education put a high premium on knowing the single right answer to a question. In fact, with programs like No Child Left Behind (a federal program that seeks to improve the performance of American public schools by making schools more accountable for meeting mandated performance levels) and its insistance that all children form every part of the country hew to the same standards, we're putting a greater emphasis than ever before on conformity and finding the "right" answer.

Alfie Kohn, Chris Lehmann, Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson and Sir Ken Robinson's comments all share a common theme - and that theme is trust. The case against high-stakes tests, grades and standardized curriculums is built on the notion that we must entrust teachers to make professional decisions.

Just as you can't test your way to better learning, you also can't mandate standardized curriculums and bully your way to student engagement without marginalizing a great number of students (and teachers).

A school that is more concerned with raising test scores than raising children has corrupted their culture. Sir Ken Robinson summarizes the sad state of affairs the culture of public education has found itself in:

Most students never get to explore the full range of their abilities and interests. Those students whose minds work differently - and we're talking about many students here; perhaps even the majority of them - can feel alienated from the whole culture of education. This is exactly why some of the most successful people you'll ever meet didn't do well in school. Education is the system that's supposed to develop our natural abilities and enable us to make our way in the world. Instead, it is stifling the individual talents and abilities of too many students and killing their motivation to learn. There's a huge irony in the middle of all of this.

We must provide students with both differentiated instruction and differentiated assessment. Rather than forcing students to learn the way we teach, we must teach the way students learn. And equally important - rather than forcing our students to conform to our narrow range of high-stakes assessment demands, we must enlist a broader range of authentic assessments that fit our students' needs.

To continue educational reforms that simply double the dose of high-stakes testing and further narrows, standardized curriculums is intellectually indefensible and morally bankrupt. Because policy makers have proven so inept at understanding this, teachers must lead the way in advocating for the schools our children deserve.