The idea of standardized testing in college is still gaining attention - most of it negative:
A parade of college presidents will appear before a federal higher-education commission meeting in Boston tomorrow, and early signs suggest it will be a lively, even contentious scene. Texas businessman Charles Miller, chairman of the commission appointed by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, has made waves by suggesting that some kind of standardized testing would help measure whether college students are taught well. There is no formal proposal yet, and Miller has stressed in press interviews that there would be no single test for every school. Still, the idea has alarmed many educators.Susan Hockfield of MIT, who had lunch with the Globe editorial board last week, didn't mince words when asked about the testing notion. ''I think it's a terrible idea," said Hockfield, who is scheduled to testify tomorrow. ''Higher education needs help, but what is really broken is K-12 education. We need more high school graduates who can understand and do math."
In other words, there's a problem, but it can't be fixed in college. I agree with Dr. Hockfield, but I wonder if she knows how strong the opposition can be to "fixing" anything in the K-12 system:
At School Without Walls and two other high schools where I am a guest teacher -- Wilson High School in the District and Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in lower Montgomery County -- I have never given a test. I respect my students too much to demean them with exercises in fake knowledge.Tests represent fear-based learning, the opposite of learning based on desire. Frightened and fretting with pre-test jitters, students stuff their minds with information they disgorge on exam sheets and sweat out the results. I know of no meaningful evidence that acing tests has anything to do with students' character development or whether their natural instincts for idealism or altruism are nurtured.
I have large amounts of evidence that tests promote the opposite: character defects.
Good luck convincing this teacher that reading and math basic skills can and should be assessed. She's much more concerned about "idealism" and "altruism." How far do those get one at MIT, I wonder? As Betsy's Page notes, this teacher teaches a class on peace. Most of his students love him, it seems - and wouldn't you, if testing was banned? - but not all:
At Bethesda-Chevy Chase, Peace Studies is taught by Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post reporter and founder and president of the Center for Teaching Peace. Though the course is taught at seven other Montgomery County high schools, some say B-CC's is perhaps the most personal and ideological of the offerings because McCarthy makes no effort to disguise his opposition to war, violence and animal testing.Saraf and Avishek Panth, also 17, acknowledge that with the exception of one lecture they sat in on this month, most of what they know about the course has come from friends and acquaintances who have taken the class. But, they said, those discussions, coupled with research they have done on McCarthy's background, have convinced them that their school should not continue to offer Peace Studies unless significant changes are made. This is not an ideological debate, they said. Rather, what bothers them the most is that McCarthy offers students only one perspective.
Of course he does. This is a crusade for him. One that doesn't involve anything as nasty and dehumanizing as testing (and that's even funnier than "high comedy," according to one Devoted Reader who forwarded the link). After reading his WaPo diatribe about testing, it's hard to believe that he actually is "welcoming of conservative dissention" on any topic.
Posted by kswygert at March 20, 2006 10:44 AM