Faulty Reform

I often think about how education 'reformers' continue to push their tougher standards, raise achievement mantra. Of course, when they say tougher standards, they mean standards that not all children can achieve, and when they say raise achievement they mean higher test scores.

I'm disheartened daily by these 'reformers' obsessive need to reduce something as messy and beautiful as learning to a standard and a test. Does anyone in their right mind actually believe that if all teachers simply taught common standards and achieved high scores on a standardized tests that the challenges our schools face everyday would simply evaporate?

What's more, 'reformers' tend to scoff at anything that can't be 'properly' reduced to a number.

When I show people some of the projects my students do through out the year or even as a substitute for a multiple choice final exam, I often get suspicious looks. Responses sound something like this: that's all well and good that the kids are doing this, but how do you grade it?

This response frustrates me because it fully acknowledges the real learning that occurs during such projects but a knee-jerk obsession with measurement seems to entirely trump this acknowledgment. 

I find this excerpt from Alfie Kohn's Schools Our Children Deserve aptly explains why real learning is so often trumped by numbers:

Anyone trying to account for the popularity of standardized tests may also want to consider our cultural penchant for attaching numbers to things. One write has called it a "prosaic mentality": a preoccupation with that which can be seen and measured. Any aspect of learning (or life) that resists being reduced to numbers is regarded as vaguely suspicious. By contrast, anything that appears in numerical form seems reassuringly scientific; if the numbers are getting larger over time, we must be making progress. Concepts like intrinsic motivation and intellectual exploration are hard for the prosaic mind to grasp, whereas test scores, like sales figures or votes, can be calculated and charted, and used to define success and failure. The more tests we make kids take, the more precise our knowledge about who has learned well, who has taught well, which districts are in trouble, and even which schools (in this brave new world of for-profit education) will survive another day.

Until we demand policy makers be actual educators - professionals who actually work in the field they are suppose to be running - education reform will be plagued by outsiders who at best can make uneducated guesses at applying solutions from the business world for classroom problems.

What's wrong with this picture? Just about everything.

The following excerpt is just the beginning of Alfie Kohn's book The Schools Our Children Deserve:

Abigail is given plenty of worksheets to complete in class as well as a substantial amount of homework. She studies to get good grades, and her school is proud of its high standardized test scores. Outstanding students are publicly recognized by the use of honor rolls, awards assemblies, and bumper stickers. Abigail's teacher, a charismatic lecturer, is clearly in control of the class: students raise their hands and wait patiently to be recognized. The teacher prepares detailed lesson plans well ahead of time, uses the latest textbooks, and gives regular quizzes to make sure kids stay on track.

What's wrong with this picture? Just about everything.

And he's not kidding!

If you really want to rethink school... if you can remember it not being all that peachy... if you want school to be better for your kids than it was for you, then you owe it to yourself and your children to stop simply reconciling yourself to the way school is now and has almost always been. Grades, tests, homework, worksheets, detention, rows of desks and lectures are not like the weather! They are not these things we have to simply resign ourselves to. These things are ideas and techniques that can and must be challenged.

If you are as revved up as me about all this, then you might want to familiarize yourself with some of the following progressive educators:

• Deborah Meier
• Ted Sizer
• Linda Darling Hammond
• Alfie Kohn
• Yong Zhao
• Constance Kamii
• Howard Gardner
• Monty Neil
• George Wood
• Pedro Noguera
• The Forum for Education and Democracy
• Fairtest

Spelling Implications

There is a good chance you've seen this graphic. If you have, stay with me, I may have a different take on this than you might expect. If you haven't seen this yet, enjoy!

If you are like most people, you could still read almost every single word without much hesitation.

The message was not lost.

Communication did in fact prevail!

So what can we learn from this?

Firstly, spelling may not be as important as my grade 8 Grammar-Nazi teacher might have thought it was. Because the first and last letters must be in proper place, I can't say spelling is entirely unimportant - but I think we can agree that if communication is our purpose, then a closer examination of the history of writing rubrics may indicate that spelling has received an inflated stature of importance.

Why?

Spelling is a very tangible skill. We can see it. We can measure it. We can count it.

If you are teaching writing, and you feel the need to quantify something, would you rather measure spelling or creativity?

However, before we throw spelling on the discard pile, let's try and figure out why spelling may still be something worth teaching.

If my blog maintained its quality content but was asblutely rdidled whit msitekas, would anything change?

As nice as you may be, I have a feeling you might make some serious judgments on my intelligence (or lack of) and it is entirely plausible that my inability to spell might annoy you to the point that you wouldn't return. However, I am a full time teacher, and I only blog when I have time to and so I know every post has mistakes - and yet, I know I have returning readers. Interesting!

Resumes written with this kind of spelling might still get the content across, but may be responsible for having it fall off the table and into a waste basket.

However, people do not become good spellers by being bullied or scared into being so.

Students must be provided with an opportunity to play with language. They must feel comfortable with spelling words wrong, and we, the teacher, are responsible for providing them with a learning environment that allows kids to see school as an opportunity to figure things out - to make mistakes and bump up against their limits. Perseverance in the face of failure may be one of the most important attributes a successful learner can adopt.

If we pursue our student's spelling skills with such dictatorial fervor as my grade 8, Grammar-Nazi teacher, we risk sabatoging the enitre learning operation.

Here's what I mean.

Which would you prefer a student to write:

OR

At what cost are we willing to gain ultimate precision in spelling?

If the point of school is to show how good you are, why would you waste your time taking risks that might show how good you're not?

Alfie Kohn illustrates an even grander concern in his book The Schools Our Children Deserve:

Invented spelling is based on the finding that young children who write more tend to read better. Not surprisingly, as we saw with Patty, kids are inclined to write more, to take risks, when they don't have to worry quite yet about spelling words perfectly - which, at that age, is unrealistic in any case. The question is what we're willing to have them sacrifice for technical accuracy... (Of course, for very young children, the choice may be even more stark; either we let them use invented spelling or we don't let them write at all.)

Albert Einstein provides us with a bit of a wake up call:

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

Inflating the importance of something easily counted like spelling can almost entirely nullify something that is not tailored towards being counted, like creativity.

Teachers must be mindful of this counting trap.

Next time you want to focus on spelling, keep in mind that if you make spelling count for too much, you might get what you ask for. Kids will spell words correctly at the cost of using words that sacrifice the intangibles such as creativity.