Alfred Orsini spots a link between the "fat" society of the US and the unwillingness to get behind tests with real bite to them:
China is a country that promises to change the economic face of the globe in the years ahead. It has an incredibly lean, mean education machine. American policymakers, seeing embarrassing data such as the poor showing of U.S. students on recent international assessments in science and math, say they want to prepare our children to meet the global competition posed by countries like China.If the No Child Left Behind law is meant to do that—to help us compete with countries that have used big tests for a long time to scientifically weed and stratify their citizens—the plan will fail. This is not just because of the problems inherent in creating and enacting such tests, but also because of the differing social, economic, and cultural contexts that surround such tests...
U.S. business leaders, in their urgent push to whip American education into line, may be among the few in our country who are truly aware of how things are outside the United States. They have a concrete motivation to be aware: money...But if my perspective from China is valid, then a more general “leaning” of America may have to happen before big tests are widely tolerated by U.S. students and their families.
For now, we Americans can make all the tests we want. Kids will never be “lean and hungry” in a fat society. Big, consequential tests run up against a lot of obstacles in America. One of them is fundamental—what the historian Richard Hofstadter labeled in his influential book as Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Others include the distraction posed by the cultural excesses that assault American kids every day and the fact that U.S. students know there is a college in America for just about anyone who can pay for it. But beyond such problems, I wonder if American kids sometimes don’t care about study because they sense that many adults don’t care about them—about the life of their minds and the enrichment of their souls.
On the one hand, I can understand why some critics claim that the US is test-obsessed; certainly, those on the front lines of education see it that way. On the other hand, how many of those tests have serious consquences attached? And by "serious," I don't mean "You'll have to go to Penn State instead of Harvard." The great hue and cry from the educrats over the fact that now, for the first time ever, schools are forced to justify their funding by showing student improvement suggests that Orsini is onto something with his theory. Americans are far more enamored of the idea of second chances and alternate pathways than they are of tests with truly high stakes.
Posted by kswygert at July 13, 2005 11:32 AM