Oh geez, our old favorite anti-testing crackpot Alfie Kohn is in the news again because of a speech he gave at Roger Williams University. Let's adjust our tinfoil hats and tune in to his frequency:
Alfie Kohn is swimming against the tide, and he would like to encourage others to take the plunge. The national speaker and author, who has twice spoken on the Oprah Winfrey show, has taken a strong stand against mandated standardized testing...
OOoohh, Oprah. I'd say that credential automatically gives his argument more merit than the conflicting arguments of, say, teachers on the front lines in schools, or parents who want public schools to improve, or test developers who work hard to create valid assessments, wouldn't you? I mean, here I am with this Ph.D. and this blog, and I've never been on Oprah.
He maintains that children learn at different rates, and to mandate a certain level of performance with students at certain ages sounds good in theory, but actually puts more stress on teachers and students and results in less, rather than more, actual learning.
As opposed to the pre-accountability system of letting children "learn at their own pace," which has resulted in plummeting SAT scores and increasing numbers of remedial classes in college.
The event was part of the newly launched Institute for Teaching and Learning at RWU, a joint initiative between the university's school of education and Bristol Warren Regional Schools. Mr. Kohn's audience included more than a dozen teachers and administrators from the district. While many of these agreed, at least in part, with his statements, there was a reluctance to go on record due to the political nature of the event.
Wow, more than a dozen? Like say, thirteen or so? And even those who showed up wanted to remain anonymous? Doesn't say much for Mr. Kohn's ability to sway a crowd, does it?
To illustrate his point, Mr. Kohn named a study in which two groups of educators were asked to teach fourth grade students. One set of teachers was told it would be held accountable for raising standards in the classroom. The other set was instructed only to facilitate students' understanding. The first group did far worse. He asked the educators to brainstorm why this might be so, and the answers varied from pressure on the teachers to a larger focus on teaching than learning.
And which study was this? Did the reporter bother to find out? Did Mr. Kohn bother to name it? Who organized this study? Where was it published? And was the one group of teachers who were instructed to "facilitate understanding" given training in doing so, and the other group given no instruction as to better help children learn the basic skills? And even if this was a valid study, does it prove that holding teachers accountable for performance is mutually exclusive from training teachers to help children understand concepts?
No, it does not. If valid, the study says what anyone with common sense knows, which is that you can't implement testing and accountability without also implementing changes in the educational process. Mr. Kohn's view of testing as incompatible with eduation unfortunately colors his entire line of reasoning.
(P.S. - I can't resist adding here that two of my readers wondered how, in this study, the difference in performance was measured between students of teachers told to "facilitate understanding" and students of teachers told they would be held accountable. Was that difference measured by - gasp! - a standardized test? It most likely was. Good catch, guys.)
Mr. Kohn said it's just not possible for a yearly test, which, of necessity, measures facts rather than more general learning, to give an accurate measure of the quality of the teaching. Because the standardized tests are designed so that the majority of students will not excel, "hard" is equated with "good," he said.
No offense to my more sensitive readers, but this is so much horse puckey. There's no evidence whatsoever that standardized tests are designed so that the majority of the students will not do well, so naturally Mr. Kohn provides no data to back up his claim. The fact that many students do not do well on these tests are a harsh indication that, in many schools, "general learning" is valued over facts, although without facts, what are those who are learning in general supposed to be learning?
So questions are often asked that would more likely be learned outside the classroom, on educational vacations or thoughtful conversations around the dinner table. This result is schools with a larger minority population and those with lower incomes routinely score lower on the tests.
If anyone knows what these two sentences mean, or why they're supposed to logically relate to one another, email me and clue me in. I'm mystified.
"If you tell me how many kids in your school are on free and reduced lunch and answer a couple of other questions about socio-economic status, I will predict with chilling accuracy what your school's test results will be," he said.
Any accuracy in that prediction exists because students who are poor often live in underfunded districts with failing schools that are infested with the worst kinds of teachers and administrators - those who believe minority children should not be challenged because they cannot achieve, those who believe that it's okay for eighth-graders to not understand basic grammar, those who believe that basic math skills are unnecessary as long as calculators exist. The only "chilling" part here is that too many people have for too long accepted this scenario as normal. The stark standardized test results no longer allow them to do so.
If educators and parents do not protest, the situation will worsen rather than improve, Mr. Kohn said. In the short term, he suggests prepping for the test as creatively as possible, then getting back to the real teaching. And in the long term, there should be an all-out fight for change, i.e., sending letters to the editor of newspapers, speaking to the school board and contacting state and U.S. legislators.
Change for what? If teachers prep for tests creatively and then teach in a way that allows their young charges to do well on these tests of basic skills, what's the problem?
Unless I'm going blind, there's absolutely no substance here that shows testing is incompatible with good teaching. Kohn is all hat and no cattle. Why the man keeps garnering news coverage, I'll never know.
Posted by kswygert at December 11, 2003 05:13 PM