This past week, I deconstructed an essay by a professor of education whose defeatist, anti-capitalist article essentially concluded that public schools should not be expected to educate all children; indeed, that until the world is made perfect, we can't expect public schools to do much of anything at all. The author cited Alfie Kohn, who is, as one of my commenters pointed out:
"...against competition -- but not just competition in schools. When you read Kohn's work, it sounds like it was written in the 1930s. He talks about "wasteful competition" in the economy, too. You know -- if only companies didn't have to advertise, if only they would all work together in the marketplace so there would be no winners or losers, etc."
Well, Alfie's brilliant - and practical! - ideas are back in evidence in yet another essay whining about the prevalence of testing and the "deadly effects" of the NCLB Act:
Author Alfie Kohn isn't a fan of standardized tests.
That much was evident during his presentation Wednesday at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point's School of Education Okray Colloquium. Dubbed "The Deadly Effects of 'Tougher Standards," Kohn's lecture ripped into the federal No Child Left Behind legislation..
"This is a system designed to make sure that all children will never succeed," Kohn said. "When they talk about rigorous testing and raising the bar, they mean ensuring failure for many of the students."
And, as Alfie does not want you to notice, that ensuring failure is something for which the schools should be held accountable. After all, if it is a given that children cannot do better when standards are raised, that suggests that something is so inherently wrong with the public school system that changes must be made. However, his conclusion is simply that we just shouldn't raise standards.
Teachers and parents shouldn't be concerned about raising standardized test scores, anyway, he said. The learning that matters isn't necessarily measured by standardized tests, he said.
He says blithely, providing no explanation and no data. Given that most if not all NCLB-related exams measure reading, writing, and arithmetic, I am assuming that he believes that these skills do not matter. I am also assuming that he believes that it isn't a national shame that so many of our public schoolchildren have not shown mastery of these core skills at a basic level. No, no, he's got a whole other universe of "learning" that "matters" defined in his head, one that somehow bypasses the need for learning to read.
"Standardized tests are an exquisitely accurate measure of the size of the houses near your schools," he said. "The tests stink. They measure what matters least..."
No, they're not an "exquisitely accurate" measure of house size; only someone unfamiliar with test reliability and standard errors of measurement would use this hyperbole, even to drive a point home. Yes, test results are similar to grades in that SES is related to a child's academic standing. That doesn't mean, however, as Alfie wants you to conlude, that children from poor backgrounds cannot achieve, nor that they cannot be expected to achieve. This does not mean that a child's educational attainment is beyond their control, nor beyond the school's control. If this were the case, then no child would have climbed from poverty, no child would have been the first in her family to go to college, no child would have done better than his parents.
Children have been able to do this in the past because the public schools they attended believed they could do it. Alfie wants to give schools a reason to give up on these kids. Despicable.
Leah Tappa, 22, president of the Association for the Education of Young Children, said "teachers are being held a little more accountable" even though they may not be at fault for students who don't do well on the standardized tests.
Oh, now that's exquisite. Here's a teacher celebrating an anti-achievement ideology that frees teachers from the requirement of having to prove they can do the one thing they've been hired to do; i.e., educate children. Ms. Tappa, I don't know if your desire to avoid accountability comes from an addled ideology or lack of self-esteem, but let me assure you, if you are standing in front of a room of small children in order to teach them the alphabet, it is indeed you who hold the power. You are their link to the world of literacy and if your charges come from poor background, then your efforts are even more important.
And ultimately you are accountable for how well they do; otherwise, why are you there?
Posted by kswygert at November 6, 2003 11:36 AM