The Education Establishment hates testing. We hear the jeers and catcalls every day in the media. In fact, this hostility has been a continuing chorus for 75 years. Do you wonder why?
Simple. Ever since the time of John Dewey, the Education Establishment has been in love with one axiom: the real reason kids go to school is to engage in social activities, not traditional academic pursuits. John Dewey and the other big players were emphatic about this: mere knowledge, as Dewey put it, was a waste of time.
Bottom line: our educators disdain facts and content. Naturally they hate tests intended to measure facts and content.
All right, at this point, the plot is just getting interesting. Imagine you are the Education Establishment; you’re building these ideologically profound schools; and kids are indeed playing harmoniously together all day, learning little. Really, its almost Heaven on Earth. Except for one little problem. Parents. These troublemakers are always asking questions: Is my boy learning to read? Can little Susie do arithmetic?
Now we see the crux of the dilemma. Schools are expected to produce a report card on each students progress. In the traditional sense, however, these students aren't making much progress. These kids do not know, often literally, which comes first, D or P. (Whole Word, as you may remember, forbade teaching the alphabet!)
Now, you see irresistible forces hitting immovable objects. The annoying parents want grades on things that schools have scant interest in teaching, never mind grading. Not only that, the parents actually want As and Bs so they are sure their kids are on schedule and headed for college!
So now we run headlong into the logistical puzzle: how does the Education Establishment fix life so every kid gets an A despite knowing little or nothing?
The answer, again, is simple and has two steps:
First, they attack anything that the typical person would recognize as a test. They try to discredit the very concept of testing, from a simple quiz to the SATs. These things must be ridiculed and rejected, for every conceivable reason.
For example, we’ve all seen the relentless (and absurd) attack on SATs. I can still remember, perhaps 20 years ago, when TIME (or some such) screeched that the SAT had actually asked the meaning of yacht. How could anyone expect inner-city kids to know a word like that?! The SATs were clearly racist and stupid. The next thing you know, these tests would expect farm boys to know what a subway is.
Another stunt is to attack a test on the grounds that it doesn’t require critical thinking or higher order thinking, as if that were really the point for middle school children who don’t know who George Washington is.
Second, while using every available sophistry to attack the concept of testing, they jury-rig new kinds of tests that the public, battered by endless propaganda, is supposed to accept as substitutes.
We’ve heard a lot about alternative assessment, a fancy name for testing in some different way. For example, instead of putting a car through rigorous tests, we could have a nice old lady drive the car around the block and give her impressions. What a smooth ride! The car gets an A.
The new jargon is authentic assessment. Typically, this is neither authentic nor assessment. It could be a teacher saying, John, tell me about the Roman Empire. And John says, It was very big, and long ago, and they built a lot of things out of stones. The teacher says, You have the feeling of the Roman Empire. And John gets an A.
Typically, in authentic assessments, the word "authentic" actually means subjective. The teacher is allowed to look at the students life, scrapbooks, interviews, projects, and come up with an impression. (Fascinatingly, Hilda Neatby, a Canadian educator, wrote a book in 1953, in which she ridiculed the idea of a teacher following students around and making notes on their activities in order to arrive at a grade. 1953!)
As far as I can tell on a fast impression, left-wing groups usually love the idea of undercutting rigorous tests. Progressives seem to agree that testing is inherently racist and unfair. Social justice demands what some activists call fair test or test scores optional.
These people constantly whine about teaching to the test, drill and kill, and all the other cliche which make it seem as though children spend their days in bondage. For example, they are sometimes asked to memorize what 6 x 8 is, or where Japan is. Can you imagine the pain?
To really enjoy the grim humor and menace in all of the preceding, lets reflect on what our Education Establishment would do to the drivers test. Who cares about the rules of the road? What matters is, do you hate carbon dioxide emissions?
Imagine that your doctor or dentist are tested via authentic assessment. All that detail about blood types and germs is silly. Are illegal aliens given affirmative action, thats the main thing? Airline pilots? The real question is whether the pilots try to create harmony among the different peoples on the planet? And chefs? What’s the big deal about taste? Surely the question is what ethnic group inspired her cuisine? Of course, lawyers, CPAs, engineers, bureaucrats generally will soon know next to nothing, and the society will collapse.
Heres our dilemma. If kids go to school without learning the freezing point of water, what seven times eight is, or who Napoleon, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin are, our Education Establishment doesn’t care. My sense is that they’re indifferent or even hostile to even the most basic background information.
Its the very same hostility we see in all discussions of testing. The elite educators hate testing because they don’t want there to be anything worth testing. Or worth learning.
I have to keep repeating this because they will try to persuade you that they have something serious to say about testing. They don’t. They have only one thing to say--they don’t like it, and want it to go away.
Many public schools have become fact-free zones. The people there don’t teach much. The kids aren’t asked to learn much. But nobody is supposed to notice. The last thing the education bosses want in these places is a real test.
(For more of this analysis, see 45: The Crusade Against Knowledge on Improve-Education.org.)
Bruce Deitrick Price writes about education, culture, and language on Improve-Education.org. His book is available: THE EDUCATION ENIGMA can be obtained on Amazon.com--click here.
