Iowa teachers Dave O’Connor and Alan Young recently published an op-ed in the Des Moines Register that illustrates how the rhetoric of “rigorous standards” in education spawns rigid, inflexible, standardized approaches to to learning rather than opportunities for students to delve into the “messy world of critical thinking.”
In addition, O’Connor and Young note how the call for is “an expensive, bureaucratic system of state-controlled content enforced through a testing regime” in Iowa will cost of up to $125 million to initiate, just so it can be determined how successful Iowa students are at recognizing right answers on multiple choice tests. A shift of resources that will line the pockets of corporate test makers at the direct expense of lowering class size, enhancing access to technology or professional development.
desmoinesregister.com
April 21, 2008
How to improve education? Resist straitjacket of standards; make efforts learner-centered
Dave O’Connor and Alan Young
The Register’s April 9 editorial, “Help Iowa Aim High: Set Rigorous Standards,” used the word “rigorous” five times in an 11-paragraph piece. Princeton University’s Word Net defines rigorous as “rigidly accurate; allowing no deviation from a standard.”
The same online dictionary defines “rigid” as “inflexible: incapable of adapting or changing to meet circumstances.” Are rigidity, inflexibility and an inability to adapt to changing circumstances really the characteristics the Register believes Iowa should be looking to instill in its 21st century citizens?
As Register editors call for “more rigorous state content standards and mandatory core curriculum,” they should be honest with Iowans. What they are really calling for is an expensive, bureaucratic system of state-controlled content enforced through a testing regime. New standardized state assessments to replace the ITBS/ITED will then be implemented at an initial cost of up to $125 million to determine how successful our students become at recognizing right answers on multiple choice tests.
External nonprofit education organizations will come onto the state payroll to review our new standards and assessment to ensure that they are rigorous enough. An additional array of end-of-course assessments and practice tests will then appear to help make sure our students are ready for the state test.
Before you know it, millions of our limited tax dollars that could have been spent on class-size reduction, technology, professional development and other proven initiatives that directly impact student learning will instead have gone into the creation of a testing bureaucracy. This approach will drown district efforts to develop more important thinking and communication capacities Iowa students need to thrive in a democratic society or compete in the global marketplace.
As Professor Linda Darling Hammond of Stanford University has noted, “…Almost nothing we do in the world of work requires recognizing one of several pre-selected responses to questions about a single fact or piece of information. Most jobs in today’s knowledge-based economy require that we find, assemble and analyze information, write and speak clearly and persuasively; and work with others to solve messy problems that don’t have predetermined answers.”
Others have argued that focusing on standardized testing and centralized curriculum squelches creativity and innovation, “…the very things that our competitors in Asia are trying to copy in their own educational reforms.”
When state-controlled curriculum is implemented to support state-mandated standards, the focus is on what is most easily tested, not what is most valuable to learn. Education evolves into a race to cover a pre-determined list of facts in time for students to regurgitate them on cheap-to-grade bubble tests. Pennsylvania, for example, has one seventh-grade science and technology class with 178 state-mandated objectives that teachers must teach. Real, inquiry-based learning – where students play a role in choosing what to explore and teachers can develop curriculum that is responsive to student interests and real-world events – takes a back seat to test preparation.
There is scant evidence to prove that this approach is effective. Professor Gerald Bracey of the Center for Education Research, Analysis and Innovation found “absolutely no correlation” between states with rigorous standards and improved standardized test scores. And the testing companies themselves, after 60-plus years, still provide virtually no evidence that standardized tests improve student learning.
The Register’s editorial criticized Iowa’s current standards as “so broad they are almost meaningless.” Iowa’s current standards, when combined with a voluntary model core curriculum, provide teachers and districts with both the direction and the flexibility they need to teach students what they need to know to be active and engaged members of our democracy. At the same time, they allow students to delve into the messy world of critical thinking that rigidly accurate and inflexible standards documents ignore.
There are many ways we can and must improve education in Iowa. But they should be learner-centered, not subject-centered, and they should be made by those closest to the children. Moving curricular decision-making even farther away from the classroom and creating a system of mandatory compliance will not yield learning communities of excellence.
Mandating top-down, simplistic rigor as reform may satisfy some legislators and editorial writers that they have “done something,” but in reality it will subvert ongoing district efforts to create even better, higher-quality, learner-centered curricula and assessments.
Our children deserve better than this kind of failed “standard” educational reform.
DAVE O’CONNOR is a teacher at Merrill Middle School and ALAN YOUNG is a teacher and president of the Des Moines Education Association.
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