Tom Friedman has a new column about education in which he almost makes an important point about the state of K-12 schooling in America, and what we can do to improve it.
The thing Friedman gets right is the easy part -- the fact that despite the willingness of American politicians to keep beating the xenophobic drums and lead the chant for everything to be "made in America," American businesses are already operating in the flat world of globalization and cost efficiency. Consequently, Friedman writes, "the trend is that for more and more jobs, average is over." In other words, if you aren't uniquely skilled to succeed in the modern world, it's only a matter of time before you'll be back looking for work.
Fair enough. But then Friedman shifts to talk about international scores on the PISA test, and America's consistent mediocrity vis a vis the rest of the world. Then he quotes the OECD's Andreas Schleicher, who asks us to "imagine, in a few years, [that] you could sign onto a Web site and see this is how my school compares with a similar school anywhere in the world." According to Schleicher, parents could then "take this information to your local superintendent and ask: 'Why are we not doing as well as schools in China or Finland?'"
I'm sorry, what?
Don't get me wrong -- in the modern world of school choice, parents need more and better ways to compare schools, and the PISA is probably the best test out there for gauging the overall health of a nation's educational quality (largely because its questions tend to be more open-ended and challenging than the U.S. versions, which are often straight multiple-choice). I'd even bet Schleicher envisions that when American parents learn, say, that Finland has a completely different approach to teacher recruitment and development, they will start demanding that we abandon our crisis response to the teaching shortage (i.e. Teach for America) and devise our own Marshall Plan for the profession.
I'd love it if that happened. And it never will if our lead vehicle is a web site that helps parents compare America's PISA scores to China's.
Why? Because America needs to have another conversation first -- the one that actually clarifies what we now know about how people learn.
The good news is ... we know a lot. More than ever before, we can assemble a picture of the ways our brains respond to and make sense of information. We can help people diagnose their individual strengths and weaknesses. And we can offer models of schooling that previous generations could only dream about -- models in which children not only love going to school, but actually acquire relevant skills and understandings about themselves and the world.
The bad news is we aren't having that conversation, and we aren't elevating those stories. We talk about "achievement" as though it's a proxy for "learning," when in fact it's a proxy for "3rd and 8th grade reading and math scores." We propose incentive structures for adults that ignore what we know about how motivation works in human beings. And we propose comparing schools to other ones around the world before we actually understand what a healthy and high-functioning school really looks like -- and requires.
What Schleicher envisions is right in spirit: a comparison platform that would empower parents, principals and teachers to demand something better. Until we deepen our collective capacity to imagine something bigger than the world of schooling the rest of us experienced, however, all a platform like that will do is sharpen our ability to demand a set of reforms that perfect our ability to succeed in a system that no longer serves our interests.
Follow Sam Chaltain on Twitter: www.twitter.com/samchaltain
business and congress have no standards,. a fact soon learned when students
become employees of multi-national corporations.
2 The human nature is always the same: never enough power.
but the means of getting that and even the meaning of the word
"power" are changing all the time.
3. When free countries use the same schooling paradigma as
the "others" they'll always fair worst. The real question is:
What is the free country attu in education, relative to the not
so free ? NOW we need to talk about it.
I spent my whole teaching career (SpEd of course) preaching the gospel of "achievement does NOT equal ability", especially when the issue of "tracking", or "leveling" was being discussed.
There are myriad reasons why so many American students perform poorly in school, especially students who have been evaluated as educationally challenged and/or who are limited
English speakers. I think I could probably write an entire doctoral dissertation on the subject right here and now. But I can tell you one thing with absolute certainty--for the most part, it ain't the kids! The vast majority of low achieving students have more than sufficient potential. However, the current political and educational zeitgeist in the U.S. motivates against substantive, well-thought out education reform that could facilitate academic success for students who face obstacles to their learning process. Of course, that would cost money.. But if the powers that be in this country ever decide to get serious about investing in the education of all of its children--well, if they've got the money, I have some ideas.
(At 22%, we were the only nation with a child poverty rate above 17%, and our child poverty rate was roughly double the average of the other nations.)
Whose interests does it serve to keep on reporting average test scores but leave out how these numbers would look if you adjusted for poverty? Gosh, I guess reporting those two sets of scores (adjusted and not) would highlight for all citizens that poverty matters--a lot--and who could possibly want us to not realize that? Who could that be? Hmm ...
You can't tell how well SCHOOLS and TEACHERS are doing based on STUDENT test scores alone, for many reasons:
1) Much of what is on the tests simply doesn't matter for real-world competence.
2) Much of what parents and employers vale most is not on the tests, and never will be.
3) By far the biggest influence on student test scores is family SES. The most amazingly successful teachers could be teaching really difficult and slow-learning students (think lead exposure or cognitive disabilities) and wind up the year with her kids' test scores in the 10th percentile.
4) Reporting in the media doesn't control for all those other causal factors and rarely includes those other goals parents and employers value. Thus, a 1st grade teacher could be judged as effective if her kids' reading subskills went up really fast (although this might signal she's using a counterproductive teaching approach)--even if this came at the cost of kids getting turned off to books, having less recess and exercise, and science mysteriously being squeezed out of the curriculum.
Pundits like Friedman assume that tests are some kind of objective measurement of what truly matters and there's some easy way to judge teacher effectiveness from them. Testing is not objective, it's not a true measurement, and it doesn't tell us who's doing a good job.
Too often, we celebrate mediocrity and many parents and schools are guilty of that. How many senseless school awards have our children received? How much money did we spend on our kid's K, 1st, 5th and 8th grade graduation? Save the money from the awards and those expensive outfits. Set expectations and award real achievement. Let our kids WORK then maybe they can compete! Let's stop applauding anytime our kids go to the bathroom.