By Mark
I came across this Washington Post re-post via A 21st Century Union, a teacher blog rooted in Maryland. The piece in the Post, in a nutshell, illuminates a simple reality about the recent PISA education rankings wherein the US was situated far from the top. The maxim "if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging" forms the root of the argument.
The hole? The fact that the rest of the world is catapulting past American education on international measures.
What has dug this hole? Kevin Welner, author of the post, states it clearly: we are in the position we are in because the current generation of tested students came of age in an education system dominated by NCLB mandates centered on test-mania. We dug our hole with high stakes tests and an obsession with scores and sanctions.
The result of that test-mania is obvious: we have not gained ground in student achievement, we've lost ground. The proof is in the data. Since data analysis is all the rage in education, we should be abandoning what clearly doesn't work, right? Logic says we ought to stop digging.
Here's the link to the post, it is worth a read. I know I'm ready to put down this shovel.
I see your point about correlation, Brian, but in terms of “what changed” in schools during the time the US’s rankings slipped, it seems like NCLB and the testing movement was The change during that time period. I’m inclined to see the PISA results as just one more piece of evidence (in what seems like a mountain of anecdotal and quantifiable evidence) that the unintended consequences of leaving no child left behind actually ended up with a good number of kids left behind.
Maybe we’d be in the same boat had NCLB never existed and the Supreme Court at the turn of the millennium elected a different president…but we’ll never know.
I kind of want to agree with Kevin Welner, but correlation doesn’t prove cause and effect.
I always tell my math students that there is a direct correlation between the number of churches built in Australia after English colonization and the number of prisons built. Thus proving that religion causes crime. 🙂
Thanks for this post, Mark. Tom also makes a good point in addendum. I think reformers are not only using that shovel to dig us deeper, but also to hit poor guys like Tom over the head. Poverty is no excuse!
Maybe we should stop using the word poverty and start describing some of the problems associated with it. Dare them to say that “lead poisoning is no excuse” and “so what if your under-nourished?” and “post-traumatic stress disorder is really the bigotry of low expectations.” Hmmm, idea for a blog post?
Last thought – they also will tell us that because some schools have beaten the odds and thrived with high-poverty student groups and neighborhoods, that therefore all schools can and should. And yes, those examples can be instructive, but the “reformy” crowd doesn’t want to get messy dealing with the details.
American education is both beautiful and horrible. We have some of the most creative and high-performing schools in the world. We also have some of the worst. The challenge has always been to bring quality to all schools.
NCLB tried and failed to do that.
What I’ve always found interesting is that the worst schools are almost always in the neighborhoods where everything else is in shambles. Yet education reformers somehow refuse to acknowledge that poor schools are a symptom of a tough neighborhood, not a cause.