Really thought-provoking essay! You put something into clear words that I have observed in a different discipline/context: I have been a community college biology instructor for well over 2 decades. Over this time I have noticed that incoming students are less and less able to ‘explore’ for loss of a better word. They have a hard time with anything that may have more than one answer and are reluctant to even start exploring something that may have more than one answer. I spend a lot of time coaxing. I have had to slow down a lot more, and also break concepts down more and practice more in order to build confidence in anything that isn’t more than a tiny snippet that could be asked in a MC question. The students have been so thoroughly trained to meet a standard and a ‘right’ answer, that they have to learn nuance, multiple solutions, or joining several smaller concepts into something more complex. They are good a maybe picking out the best answer from a few choices, but they can’t explain their own reasoning in their own words. This semester I have an older student that went to K-12 before this standardization craze, and I see the difference so clearly.
At any rate, I also run a grant scholarship program to support underrepresented minority students to persist in STEM majors because the US is not training enough STEM professionals for the current and future needs of the country. But, from my experience, the country is also losing so much by the way that K-12 has trained students on terms of innovation and exploration as well as in-depth expertise. A STEM professional working only to standards isn’t going to drive innovation or solve long-standing problems. But the real tragedy is in the loss of human potential and the joy that comes from developing that potential. Many students do finally have a chance to develop this in college but the standardized curriculum has also been creeping into especially lower division education. Equity is always on my mind, but what is happening in K-12 does not seem to be the right way to go about it.
Anna—thank you! I’m Restacking this. We’ve produced students who are terribly afraid of being wrong and of wandering into gray areas where answers are murky or complex. This isn’t an education that prepares students for a complex world.
Peter — really grateful for the love and the thinking in this essay. I appreciate how seriously you take the long view of the accountability era, and I recognize so much of what you describe from my own experience. The narrowing of curriculum, the test-prep rituals, the pressure that shifted the focus away from kids and toward institutional survival — those were real distortions, and in many cases they hit the exact students who deserved the richest experiences.
Your prescription — “have kids read more and have them write more; have them speak more and let them play more; test the kids less and trust the teachers and their processes more” — is, in my book, dead on.
As I sit with that, I find myself wondering whether the real problem is less the existence of tests and more the way we’ve chosen to respond to the data they generate. In my experience, kids who are actually doing rigorous, consistent reading and writing and talking — work anchored in whole books and real intellectual engagement — tend to perform quite well on these exams. Growth metrics on high-stakes tests often do tell us something about how much thinking actually happened in a classroom over the course of a year. I still think we over-test (wildly so,) but I also see value in that signal.
The harm seems to come when we interpret test scores through a “mastery checklist” lens and then reduce instruction to isolated skills in response. That’s the part that feels toxic to me — the idea that comprehension can be reverse-engineered one standard at a time, and that an entire adaptive-learning, mastery-based profit complex has risen up in its wake, replacing time for, well, actual reading and writing.
We often talk about this as if it’s a trade-off — “well, we’re getting better results, but it’s harmful in the long haul…” But I think the most potent argument is the one you make here: it’s not a trade-off at all. Skill-drill programs suppress long-term learning and short-term results. Good instruction — the kind of reading, writing, speaking, and authentic engagement you’re defending — drives rich life outcomes and, almost incidentally, strong metrics. Kids learn, and it shows.
Would love to hear your thoughts. I always value your writing and thinking. 🙌🏻
There's so much to respond to here! I'll stick to the third and fourth paragraphs and try to be brief. Yes, I DO believe in the necessity of some standardized tests. I feel they should be few and far apart, valid and reliable, and ideally administered by third parties--not teachers, districts, or states. (Not that teachers shouldn't assign their own exams; they just shouldn't purport to use them as generalizable educational "data" beyond a student's grade in their class.) I like your use of the word "signal," and I addressed some of my answer to your comments in this portion when I wrote to Abra below.
The isolation of the skills--the over-breaking-down, reverse engineering, missing the forest for the trees, all of that--Yes! Toxic to children, toxic to educators, toxic to our institution, and toxic to our society!
Really great piece! It's a perspective that needs more attention. I think we knee-jerk into blaming 'screens' too fast when it comes to education and attention spans. I think educational software used in classes has this testing ideology built so deep into it, it's going to be really hard to shift.
I agree entirely. Screens at home are problematic, but screens at schools have proven highly distracting and very hard to regulate. My class is largely analog this year, but I teach in a subject area where I'm able to do such!
Hi Peter, so here is my anecdote about this recently. My 13 year old son comes home and complains about being bored at school. I probe a bit deeper and ask about what classes are the most boring. He tells me English. He tells me a typical day is entering the class, loading up the Amplify platform they use on a Chromebook, then working away in it until the teacher tells them to stop. I wanted to understand it a bit more so I logged into his account and started doing the work. He was right, it was dead boring. Small reading snippets followed by multi-choice questions - breaking down texts into digestible chunks with a test after each one. It felt like doing a driving test. I can't remember what I was doing in English at 13, but it wasn't this!
Paul—I’m so sorry. This is the kind of things districts are driven to do to earn good test scores today, and it’s beyond dispiriting and demoralizing for the kids. When I was fourteen I read The Odyssey. Did I get it all? Did I master it? Even half of it? Certainly not… but I developed some skills and reading schemas along the way and it was interesting—I had a sense there was more there—and I read the books that followed with some interest and later reread The Odyssey and loved it. Today, only particularly lucky kids get assigned all of that book in school, but many get little excerpts as you have described…
Peter, many appreciations for your post and insightful analysis of the broader educational landscape. Alas all is not lost!
Indeed there is an upwelling and undercurrent of education networks beneath the umbrella of ‘deeper learning’ that are ready to seize this moment and meet your call for a shift away from standardization and work towards an education model and system that prioritizes the acquisition of competencies and skills (see high tech high, el education, new tech network and more).
True, the broader adoption of deeper learning is by no means a panacea, but I do see some light at the end of the tunnel as deeper learning approaches continue to spread (see NY states NY Inspires initiative) and other portrait of a graduate creations more regionally and locally. And although there is some movement and mobilization in this direction there is also cause for concern of this vision falling to the wayside for the want of exemplars of instruction and models of assessment that folks can point to (and work towards) that in some concrete way capture the inherent messiness of teaching towards this end as you astutely mention. Perhaps like any worthy vision and goal we must find a way to work towards the ideal while living in the real.
So much more to say and do on this front + thank you for sparking this forum of dialogue.
"Perhaps like any worthy vision and goal we must find a way to work towards the ideal while living in the real."
If there is an academic group advocating for messiness and depth, they can count me part of their cause until I find good reason to leave it! Thanks for this note of encouragement! Living and teaching here in 'the real,' I'm going to try to keep using my voice, and I appreciate yours!
Damn Peter. Wow. Such a beautiful and tragic diagnosis of the waters we're actually swimming in. Keep writing, keep showing us the real deal. My goodness this is deep and rich.
A rather depressing conclusion, but at least it's honest. So much depends on morale and a robust cohort, both of teachers and of students. Dan Pink captured much of it in "Drive" -- if you limit teachers' autonomy, sense of mastery, and sense of purpose, you'll have killed much of their motivation. No one wants to be a rubric drone, at least no one who chose the teaching profession. It's trickier with students, but like children in a family they'll pick up on cracks in authority. If it seems like the principal doesn't really support what the teachers care most about, then students will absorb that hidden curriculum. And part of growing up is exploiting those cracks and loopholes -- it's one form intelligence takes, seeking the path of maximum reward for minimal effort. So to keep standards high it requires parents, teachers, and administrators who all sing the same tune for the sake of the kids. Since no one can agree now on what the goals really are, it's hard to find that unity. But it is the only kind of alignment that will make a difference.
Agree entirely. We need strong individual teachers like we need a strong independent press, and we can only have those things if people join in agreeing they are a ‘good’ even when we don’t like what we are hearing from them—and we haven’t liked what we’ve been hearing from them in the last twenty years, so these ‘messengers’ have largely been squashed and killed. Your words about the “hidden curriculum” are worth several essays—I certainly learned as much or more from the “hidden curriculum” of education in high school as I did from the explicit one almost thirty years ago, and the ‘hidden curriculum’ now, hardly hidden, but exposed in many places, is teaching some students some unhealthy and I think pernicious things about how our society works, how they should work, and how one ‘gets ahead’ in America.
As a mother with two kids in the public education system, I really appreciate this pieces and all your others. Thank you for continuing to pull back the curtain on education.
I’m glad you’ve appreciated my pieces. I hope I don’t come across as too critical of public education. I really am a fan of the institution, and really do think it can be and often is an effective conveyor to help raise our children, educate them, and give them social, academic, and professional skills to help them thrive in our society. I hope that by ‘pulling back the curtain’ I haven’t made you think it’s all rot, though I do think there are currently some problems and much current thinking has taken us away from achieving our best outcomes. If nothing else, I hope you’ll realize that you can’t solely rely on public education to raise and educate your children, and I hope you and your children are reading and writing and playing with ideas at home!
Definitely not all rot! My kids have wonderfully engaged teachers who I can tell are invested in them. My guess is that there are a lot of folks like you who ultimately just want kids to thrive and feel hamstrung by the bureaucracy of making that a reality in equitable ways.
I was a middle school special education teacher (learning specialist, which meant I did pullouts and push-ins) from 2004-2014. Oh do I have stories about this. Do I ever. I absolutely despise high-stakes standardized testing and what it has done to our classrooms. And I say this as a teacher who walked struggling readers plus ESL students who were also special ed through Steinbeck's *The Red Pony* because I wanted to teach them about symbolism and foreshadowing during the one year I was allowed to teach Resource English. They got it.
I came across the phrase "the soft bigotry of low expectations" in grad school, and it's still applicable to far too many admin/district-level decisions where I teach. Slowly cutting services while reducing expectations - all in the name of compassion or the equal playing field - is a game that's been played in the NYCDOE for far too long.
I suspect that this is because if we honestly started asking why kids aren't learning, we'd start coming across all sorts of topics - food security, housing security, access to mental health services, parental economic precarity - that need urgent attention, and investments which policymakers don't want to make.
Thanks for raising the relevant issues, and using your platform to address them. A pleasure to read your thinking, as ever.
I think of that 'soft bigotry' quote often. When the dialogue around "privilege" really picked up I was teaching in classrooms where the kids were largely disadvantaged, and it's a tough thing to address. On one hand, you want to talk about social structures, social forces, the consequences of our histories, and the like, but on the other, you have a number of kids in the room whose belief in education can be tenuous and who might be looking for excuses to throw their hands up, say the system is rigged, and give up. I always wanted my students to feel like they had agency and control of their own lives, as instilling this belief in students is one way to improve their outcomes and protect their mental health. Tough pedagogical decisions and discussions to navigate.
My head is a bit twisted with arguing that standardized tests prove we shouldn't be teaching with standaradized tests but... I don't disagree. My own child's writing mechanics do not seem to be what they should be at 12 years old, and she is a top tester in her grade so I really question the whole shebang. One thing I notice is that the greatest decline occurs post-pandemic. Are you reading it this way, too? Does not contradict your argument-- let teachers teach as that hell of home teachin/remote high school learning sure seems it did no one any good.
I can speak to this. I'm not entirely opposed to valid and reliable tests, ideally administered by third-parties, and even think that some standardized tests are very good and should be a part of measuring students' growth and success. I like the ACT and SAT, for example, and think College Board's AP Literature exam is a good test. I'm dubious of states creating and administering their own tests, and very skeptical of a new-wave (in the last 15-20 years, seemingly increasing) teaching philosophy that asks cohorts of teachers to work together to create and deliver common assessments and common lessons to students. I spoke on this more extensively on my post "Notes on a Toxic Pedagogy." Part of my criticism is implicitly directed (explicitly, now) at the so-called "Mississippi Miracle" and the manifold ways, including holding third grade students back, that that state worked to improve its 4th grade reading scores--improvements that largely dissipate by the eighth grade, and my concern that their argument they used 'the science of teaching' (now several legislatures are arguing that their schools should do the same), when really there was likely an awful lot of pressure put on kids and teachers, some curricular narrowing, and the kinds of exhausting "Explicit & Direct Instruction" that I would argue fast become tedious and are ultimately counter-productive in the long run. --Which might all be to say that one way to abridge this is that this era of 'standardized education' (which @Luke Morin has aptly called "The Age of Accountability") too often encourages gaming the system to ginny-up statistical improvements that a) aren't real, and b) are counter-productive to what I and many educators would call "real, authentic learning" and the production of life-long readers and life-long learners... to say nothing of a healthy democracy populated by intellectually healthy people.
Re: Post-pandemic, I would agree that the declines were very bad, but my argument is still that things are worse because of the standardized-testing era, curricular narrowing, and a shift in mindset about what matters in education (the grade sheet results! For the kids AND the teachers!).
At 12 years-old, I wouldn't worry too much--your daughter still has a great deal of time to grow as a reader and writer! (I presume there are some mechanics, at least?!)
Thanks for the thorough response. Yes, she’s doing great and has good teachers, plus Word autocorrects a lot of it when she gets to type her assignments. I just also want to make sure she knows the fundamentals and will be able to correct her own mistakes, to be able tell when the computer has gotten it wrong.
In your view, what would be better than a standardized test?
I ask because I agree that the current system is failing in a lot of ways. That being said, I went to a school without standardized tests and I can confirm that it was also "failing" students, just in different ways (in this particular case, it was time management and ability to focus on anything you weren't interested in).
I don’t have problems with good standardized tests applied sparingly. I do think it’s appropriate and responsible to use them. My complaints are with the over-emphasis on tests as end-all, be-all, the twisting of curricula around them, and what I view as wrong-headed moves to have units of teachers work together to create and implement their own common assessments—and the associated narrowings of the curricula and over-reliance on teaching strategies like direct instruction which I feel become tedious and exhausting for all involved awfully fast.
There’s got to be a happy in-between, and I think it’s probably closer to your experience than the test-centric one I’ve described.
Wow! This is an incredible essay! I could restack a dozen different quotes from it because you absolutely nail it. We should be broadening students' horizons and teacher autonomy with the things that really matter, not continually narrowing to single, meaningless data points. Thank you for this piece.
Really thought-provoking essay! You put something into clear words that I have observed in a different discipline/context: I have been a community college biology instructor for well over 2 decades. Over this time I have noticed that incoming students are less and less able to ‘explore’ for loss of a better word. They have a hard time with anything that may have more than one answer and are reluctant to even start exploring something that may have more than one answer. I spend a lot of time coaxing. I have had to slow down a lot more, and also break concepts down more and practice more in order to build confidence in anything that isn’t more than a tiny snippet that could be asked in a MC question. The students have been so thoroughly trained to meet a standard and a ‘right’ answer, that they have to learn nuance, multiple solutions, or joining several smaller concepts into something more complex. They are good a maybe picking out the best answer from a few choices, but they can’t explain their own reasoning in their own words. This semester I have an older student that went to K-12 before this standardization craze, and I see the difference so clearly.
At any rate, I also run a grant scholarship program to support underrepresented minority students to persist in STEM majors because the US is not training enough STEM professionals for the current and future needs of the country. But, from my experience, the country is also losing so much by the way that K-12 has trained students on terms of innovation and exploration as well as in-depth expertise. A STEM professional working only to standards isn’t going to drive innovation or solve long-standing problems. But the real tragedy is in the loss of human potential and the joy that comes from developing that potential. Many students do finally have a chance to develop this in college but the standardized curriculum has also been creeping into especially lower division education. Equity is always on my mind, but what is happening in K-12 does not seem to be the right way to go about it.
Anna—thank you! I’m Restacking this. We’ve produced students who are terribly afraid of being wrong and of wandering into gray areas where answers are murky or complex. This isn’t an education that prepares students for a complex world.
Peter — really grateful for the love and the thinking in this essay. I appreciate how seriously you take the long view of the accountability era, and I recognize so much of what you describe from my own experience. The narrowing of curriculum, the test-prep rituals, the pressure that shifted the focus away from kids and toward institutional survival — those were real distortions, and in many cases they hit the exact students who deserved the richest experiences.
Your prescription — “have kids read more and have them write more; have them speak more and let them play more; test the kids less and trust the teachers and their processes more” — is, in my book, dead on.
As I sit with that, I find myself wondering whether the real problem is less the existence of tests and more the way we’ve chosen to respond to the data they generate. In my experience, kids who are actually doing rigorous, consistent reading and writing and talking — work anchored in whole books and real intellectual engagement — tend to perform quite well on these exams. Growth metrics on high-stakes tests often do tell us something about how much thinking actually happened in a classroom over the course of a year. I still think we over-test (wildly so,) but I also see value in that signal.
The harm seems to come when we interpret test scores through a “mastery checklist” lens and then reduce instruction to isolated skills in response. That’s the part that feels toxic to me — the idea that comprehension can be reverse-engineered one standard at a time, and that an entire adaptive-learning, mastery-based profit complex has risen up in its wake, replacing time for, well, actual reading and writing.
We often talk about this as if it’s a trade-off — “well, we’re getting better results, but it’s harmful in the long haul…” But I think the most potent argument is the one you make here: it’s not a trade-off at all. Skill-drill programs suppress long-term learning and short-term results. Good instruction — the kind of reading, writing, speaking, and authentic engagement you’re defending — drives rich life outcomes and, almost incidentally, strong metrics. Kids learn, and it shows.
Would love to hear your thoughts. I always value your writing and thinking. 🙌🏻
Luke--
There's so much to respond to here! I'll stick to the third and fourth paragraphs and try to be brief. Yes, I DO believe in the necessity of some standardized tests. I feel they should be few and far apart, valid and reliable, and ideally administered by third parties--not teachers, districts, or states. (Not that teachers shouldn't assign their own exams; they just shouldn't purport to use them as generalizable educational "data" beyond a student's grade in their class.) I like your use of the word "signal," and I addressed some of my answer to your comments in this portion when I wrote to Abra below.
The isolation of the skills--the over-breaking-down, reverse engineering, missing the forest for the trees, all of that--Yes! Toxic to children, toxic to educators, toxic to our institution, and toxic to our society!
Looking forward to your future writings,
Peter
Well said 👏
Really great piece! It's a perspective that needs more attention. I think we knee-jerk into blaming 'screens' too fast when it comes to education and attention spans. I think educational software used in classes has this testing ideology built so deep into it, it's going to be really hard to shift.
Hi Paul,
I agree entirely. Screens at home are problematic, but screens at schools have proven highly distracting and very hard to regulate. My class is largely analog this year, but I teach in a subject area where I'm able to do such!
Thanks for reading!
Peter
Hi Peter, so here is my anecdote about this recently. My 13 year old son comes home and complains about being bored at school. I probe a bit deeper and ask about what classes are the most boring. He tells me English. He tells me a typical day is entering the class, loading up the Amplify platform they use on a Chromebook, then working away in it until the teacher tells them to stop. I wanted to understand it a bit more so I logged into his account and started doing the work. He was right, it was dead boring. Small reading snippets followed by multi-choice questions - breaking down texts into digestible chunks with a test after each one. It felt like doing a driving test. I can't remember what I was doing in English at 13, but it wasn't this!
Paul—I’m so sorry. This is the kind of things districts are driven to do to earn good test scores today, and it’s beyond dispiriting and demoralizing for the kids. When I was fourteen I read The Odyssey. Did I get it all? Did I master it? Even half of it? Certainly not… but I developed some skills and reading schemas along the way and it was interesting—I had a sense there was more there—and I read the books that followed with some interest and later reread The Odyssey and loved it. Today, only particularly lucky kids get assigned all of that book in school, but many get little excerpts as you have described…
Peter, many appreciations for your post and insightful analysis of the broader educational landscape. Alas all is not lost!
Indeed there is an upwelling and undercurrent of education networks beneath the umbrella of ‘deeper learning’ that are ready to seize this moment and meet your call for a shift away from standardization and work towards an education model and system that prioritizes the acquisition of competencies and skills (see high tech high, el education, new tech network and more).
True, the broader adoption of deeper learning is by no means a panacea, but I do see some light at the end of the tunnel as deeper learning approaches continue to spread (see NY states NY Inspires initiative) and other portrait of a graduate creations more regionally and locally. And although there is some movement and mobilization in this direction there is also cause for concern of this vision falling to the wayside for the want of exemplars of instruction and models of assessment that folks can point to (and work towards) that in some concrete way capture the inherent messiness of teaching towards this end as you astutely mention. Perhaps like any worthy vision and goal we must find a way to work towards the ideal while living in the real.
So much more to say and do on this front + thank you for sparking this forum of dialogue.
Jared!
"Perhaps like any worthy vision and goal we must find a way to work towards the ideal while living in the real."
If there is an academic group advocating for messiness and depth, they can count me part of their cause until I find good reason to leave it! Thanks for this note of encouragement! Living and teaching here in 'the real,' I'm going to try to keep using my voice, and I appreciate yours!
Peter
Damn Peter. Wow. Such a beautiful and tragic diagnosis of the waters we're actually swimming in. Keep writing, keep showing us the real deal. My goodness this is deep and rich.
Jeff--
Thank you! It's incredibly gratifying to get positive feedback from readers and peers!
Much appreciated,
Peter
A rather depressing conclusion, but at least it's honest. So much depends on morale and a robust cohort, both of teachers and of students. Dan Pink captured much of it in "Drive" -- if you limit teachers' autonomy, sense of mastery, and sense of purpose, you'll have killed much of their motivation. No one wants to be a rubric drone, at least no one who chose the teaching profession. It's trickier with students, but like children in a family they'll pick up on cracks in authority. If it seems like the principal doesn't really support what the teachers care most about, then students will absorb that hidden curriculum. And part of growing up is exploiting those cracks and loopholes -- it's one form intelligence takes, seeking the path of maximum reward for minimal effort. So to keep standards high it requires parents, teachers, and administrators who all sing the same tune for the sake of the kids. Since no one can agree now on what the goals really are, it's hard to find that unity. But it is the only kind of alignment that will make a difference.
Agree entirely. We need strong individual teachers like we need a strong independent press, and we can only have those things if people join in agreeing they are a ‘good’ even when we don’t like what we are hearing from them—and we haven’t liked what we’ve been hearing from them in the last twenty years, so these ‘messengers’ have largely been squashed and killed. Your words about the “hidden curriculum” are worth several essays—I certainly learned as much or more from the “hidden curriculum” of education in high school as I did from the explicit one almost thirty years ago, and the ‘hidden curriculum’ now, hardly hidden, but exposed in many places, is teaching some students some unhealthy and I think pernicious things about how our society works, how they should work, and how one ‘gets ahead’ in America.
As a mother with two kids in the public education system, I really appreciate this pieces and all your others. Thank you for continuing to pull back the curtain on education.
Hi Sara,
I’m glad you’ve appreciated my pieces. I hope I don’t come across as too critical of public education. I really am a fan of the institution, and really do think it can be and often is an effective conveyor to help raise our children, educate them, and give them social, academic, and professional skills to help them thrive in our society. I hope that by ‘pulling back the curtain’ I haven’t made you think it’s all rot, though I do think there are currently some problems and much current thinking has taken us away from achieving our best outcomes. If nothing else, I hope you’ll realize that you can’t solely rely on public education to raise and educate your children, and I hope you and your children are reading and writing and playing with ideas at home!
Peter
Definitely not all rot! My kids have wonderfully engaged teachers who I can tell are invested in them. My guess is that there are a lot of folks like you who ultimately just want kids to thrive and feel hamstrung by the bureaucracy of making that a reality in equitable ways.
Hamstrung is the word!
I agree with you that education has been broken for awhile--before phones, before AI. I'm curious as to your take on these 2 pieces: https://scienceoflearning.substack.com/p/beyond-belief-reframing-teaching and https://thenext30years.substack.com/p/stopping-the-pendulum-making-education
I was a middle school special education teacher (learning specialist, which meant I did pullouts and push-ins) from 2004-2014. Oh do I have stories about this. Do I ever. I absolutely despise high-stakes standardized testing and what it has done to our classrooms. And I say this as a teacher who walked struggling readers plus ESL students who were also special ed through Steinbeck's *The Red Pony* because I wanted to teach them about symbolism and foreshadowing during the one year I was allowed to teach Resource English. They got it.
I came across the phrase "the soft bigotry of low expectations" in grad school, and it's still applicable to far too many admin/district-level decisions where I teach. Slowly cutting services while reducing expectations - all in the name of compassion or the equal playing field - is a game that's been played in the NYCDOE for far too long.
I suspect that this is because if we honestly started asking why kids aren't learning, we'd start coming across all sorts of topics - food security, housing security, access to mental health services, parental economic precarity - that need urgent attention, and investments which policymakers don't want to make.
Thanks for raising the relevant issues, and using your platform to address them. A pleasure to read your thinking, as ever.
Cameron--
I think of that 'soft bigotry' quote often. When the dialogue around "privilege" really picked up I was teaching in classrooms where the kids were largely disadvantaged, and it's a tough thing to address. On one hand, you want to talk about social structures, social forces, the consequences of our histories, and the like, but on the other, you have a number of kids in the room whose belief in education can be tenuous and who might be looking for excuses to throw their hands up, say the system is rigged, and give up. I always wanted my students to feel like they had agency and control of their own lives, as instilling this belief in students is one way to improve their outcomes and protect their mental health. Tough pedagogical decisions and discussions to navigate.
A pleasure getting feedback from you, as ever.
Peter
Nail hit cleanly on the head, once again: a teacher can't be so committed to consciousness-raising that they end up fostering hopelessness.
My head is a bit twisted with arguing that standardized tests prove we shouldn't be teaching with standaradized tests but... I don't disagree. My own child's writing mechanics do not seem to be what they should be at 12 years old, and she is a top tester in her grade so I really question the whole shebang. One thing I notice is that the greatest decline occurs post-pandemic. Are you reading it this way, too? Does not contradict your argument-- let teachers teach as that hell of home teachin/remote high school learning sure seems it did no one any good.
Hi Abra,
I can speak to this. I'm not entirely opposed to valid and reliable tests, ideally administered by third-parties, and even think that some standardized tests are very good and should be a part of measuring students' growth and success. I like the ACT and SAT, for example, and think College Board's AP Literature exam is a good test. I'm dubious of states creating and administering their own tests, and very skeptical of a new-wave (in the last 15-20 years, seemingly increasing) teaching philosophy that asks cohorts of teachers to work together to create and deliver common assessments and common lessons to students. I spoke on this more extensively on my post "Notes on a Toxic Pedagogy." Part of my criticism is implicitly directed (explicitly, now) at the so-called "Mississippi Miracle" and the manifold ways, including holding third grade students back, that that state worked to improve its 4th grade reading scores--improvements that largely dissipate by the eighth grade, and my concern that their argument they used 'the science of teaching' (now several legislatures are arguing that their schools should do the same), when really there was likely an awful lot of pressure put on kids and teachers, some curricular narrowing, and the kinds of exhausting "Explicit & Direct Instruction" that I would argue fast become tedious and are ultimately counter-productive in the long run. --Which might all be to say that one way to abridge this is that this era of 'standardized education' (which @Luke Morin has aptly called "The Age of Accountability") too often encourages gaming the system to ginny-up statistical improvements that a) aren't real, and b) are counter-productive to what I and many educators would call "real, authentic learning" and the production of life-long readers and life-long learners... to say nothing of a healthy democracy populated by intellectually healthy people.
Re: Post-pandemic, I would agree that the declines were very bad, but my argument is still that things are worse because of the standardized-testing era, curricular narrowing, and a shift in mindset about what matters in education (the grade sheet results! For the kids AND the teachers!).
At 12 years-old, I wouldn't worry too much--your daughter still has a great deal of time to grow as a reader and writer! (I presume there are some mechanics, at least?!)
Thanks for the thorough response. Yes, she’s doing great and has good teachers, plus Word autocorrects a lot of it when she gets to type her assignments. I just also want to make sure she knows the fundamentals and will be able to correct her own mistakes, to be able tell when the computer has gotten it wrong.
In your view, what would be better than a standardized test?
I ask because I agree that the current system is failing in a lot of ways. That being said, I went to a school without standardized tests and I can confirm that it was also "failing" students, just in different ways (in this particular case, it was time management and ability to focus on anything you weren't interested in).
Hi Sam,
I don’t have problems with good standardized tests applied sparingly. I do think it’s appropriate and responsible to use them. My complaints are with the over-emphasis on tests as end-all, be-all, the twisting of curricula around them, and what I view as wrong-headed moves to have units of teachers work together to create and implement their own common assessments—and the associated narrowings of the curricula and over-reliance on teaching strategies like direct instruction which I feel become tedious and exhausting for all involved awfully fast.
There’s got to be a happy in-between, and I think it’s probably closer to your experience than the test-centric one I’ve described.
Thanks for reading and commenting!
Peter
Wow! This is an incredible essay! I could restack a dozen different quotes from it because you absolutely nail it. We should be broadening students' horizons and teacher autonomy with the things that really matter, not continually narrowing to single, meaningless data points. Thank you for this piece.
Adrian--thank you for the read and support as always! It's incredibly reassuring to get such positive feedback from educators I admire and trust!
Looking forward to your upcoming writings!
Peter