Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Standardized Testing, Where the Grass is Always Greener

First, let me apologize for the lack of posts these past few months. I've let this project slide far too long and I'll make sure that doesn't happen again.

The argument I make in this post isn't a new one. It is, however, unalterably true.

In the 1980s, when the economic war with Japan was heating up, many American educators looked to the Japanese system with envy. Universal literacy, high achievement on international tests in virtually every subject, a well-educated workforce powering what seemed like an unstoppable economic juggernaut. And how did they do it? A national curriculum, cram schools, and an obsession with standardized testing.

The pressure was, and remains, so great that it drives teens to suicide and has led to a class of students known as "ronin," who take a year off after high school for the sole purpose of studying for the make-or-break college entrance exams.

Meanwhile, Japanese educators were looking at the United States, marveling at the enormous strides made by her research universities. As the 1990s wore on and the Japanese economic bubble burst, many Japanese educators started calling for a more American educational system, one that rewards creativity as well as achievement. The problems with the Japanese economy, they said, could be traced in part to the rigidity of the national curriculum, a rigidity that allowed no room for the next Bill Gates to pursue his passion and flourish.

Today, we're once again seeing this cycle. This time, it's the Chinese being held up as a K-12 model for Americans to follow, a model built on testing, testing, and more testing. Howard Gardner, the developer of the multiple intelligences theory (MI), once saw a carton of milk in China that advertised how it would help children boost all 8 of their intelligences. A Chinese colleague explained that, while Americans used MI to find out where a child's strengths lay, Chinese used it as a guide for the 8 areas in which their children should excel.

And, once again, we're seeing Asian educators wondering how their universities can match the academic research powerhouses in the United States.

It is ironic that so many Chinese students, and their families, see an American college education as the ticket to success. The American university system is not based on a rigid admissions process - a student can theoretically work her way from an open-admissions community college to an Ivy League medical school - and attempts to consider the "whole person" during the application process.

Standardized testing is threatening to change that. The greatness of the American educational system lies in its diversity, the creative richness of multiple talents and interests in one place, sharing and rejecting ideas, thoughts, arguments. Standardized testing, especially of the multiple-choice variety, teaches instead that (a) there is only one right answer and (b) there is always a right answer.

The world doesn't work that way. Just ask any business executive.

If the United States is to maintain its economic and scientific mantle, we must ensure that standardized remains just one aspect of our children's curriculum. Too many school districts have adopted it as the primary driver of the curriculum. This has to stop.

I will deal with the increasing standardization of the American school system in a future post. For now, I will say only that the current uses of standardized testing are stupid, bordering on criminal. Something has to be done.