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?

Scientifically Tested Tests

The New York Times featured a brilliant article by Susan Engel on September 19. She wrote eloquently about rethinking assessment. 

Her main points are worthy of serious reflection:

• why are we so hell-bent on census testing when we could be assessing samples of students?
• why do we continue to use such limited assessment formats such as multiple choice?
• why do we continue to stress the importance of such limited measurements when there is good reason to believe that some of the worse teachers successfully hide behind such narrow goals and rigid scripts?
• why do we subscribe to such a behaviourist's approach of rewarding and punishing schools based on test scores that tend to conceal more than they reveal?
• if even a fraction of these questions have validity, then the real question is cui bono? Who benefits from the use of such limited measurements?

As much as I love to ask challenging questions, I can see the merit in offering up probable solutions, and this is exactly what I love so much about Susan Engel's article. She provides a number of substitutes to traditional, fill-in-the-bubble standardized tests:

Instead, we should come up with assessments that truly measure the qualities of well-educated children: the ability to understand what they read; an interest in using books to gain knowledge; the capacity to know when a problem calls for mathematics and quantification; the agility to move from concrete examples to abstract principles and back again; the ability to think about a situation in several different ways; and a dynamic working knowledge of the society in which they live.

This task is not as difficult as one might think. In recent years, psychologists have found ways to measure things as subtle as the forces that govern our moral choices and the thought processes that underlie unconscious stereotyping. And many promising techniques already used by child development experts could provide a starting point for improving school assessments.

For instance, using recordings of children’s everyday speech, developmental psychologists can calculate two important indicators of intellectual functioning: the grammatical complexity of their sentences and the size of their working vocabularies (not the words they circle during a test, but the ones they use in their real lives). Why not do the same in schools? We could even employ a written version, analyzing random samples of children’s essays and stories.

Psychologists have also found that a good way to measure a person’s literacy level is to test his ability to identify the names of actual authors amid the names of non-authors. In other words, someone who knows that Mark Twain and J. K. Rowling are published authors — and that, say, Robert Sponge is not — reads more. We could periodically administer such a test to children to find out how much they have read as opposed to which isolated skills they have been practicing for a test.

When children recount a story that they have read or that has been read to them, it provides all kinds of information about their narrative skill, an essential component of literacy. We could give students a book and then have them talk with a trained examiner about what they read; the oral reconstruction could be analyzed for evidence of their narrative comprehension.

Researchers have also found that the way a student critiques a simple science experiment shows whether he understands the idea of controlling variables, a key component in all science work. To assess children’s scientific skills, an experiment could be described to them, in writing, and then they would explain how they would improve upon it.

Of course, these new assessments could include some paper-and-pencil work as well. But that work would have to measure students’ thinking skills, not whether they can select a right answer from preset options. For instance, children could write essays in response to a prompt like, “Choose something you are good at, and describe to your reader how you do it.” That would allow each student to draw on his area of expertise, show his ability to analyze the process, describe a task logically and convey real information and substance. In turn, a prompt of, “Write a description of yourself from your mother’s point of view,” would help gauge the child’s ability to understand the perspectives of others.

Negotiable Formats

Unless the exam format is literally the standard or objective, the format of the exam or project should be negotiable.

Unless you can show me a standard from anywhere in the world that specifically outlines the ability to answer a multiple choice question as the learning outcome, why in the world would we ever provide children with no other format to exhibit their learning?

And yet how many quizzes, mid-terms, final exams, standardized tests, homework assignments, minor assignments or major projects invite children to negotiate their format?

The lack of legitimate answers to these questions tell us one thing: most assessment formats are less about the students and more about the system. Cui bono?

This is exactly why there is such a chasm between the idea of differentiated instruction and standardized assessment.

The paradox is enough to drive anyone to drink.

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.