The 21st Century Principal

It seems new Secretary of Education, John King seeks to continue the same reliance on test scores and superficial ratings systems to determine how effective schools are doing that his predecessor Arne Duncan pushed. From his recent remarks, King wants to force states into using a "A-F Rating system" (or something similar) to rate the effectiveness of schools, which happens to be the same nonsensical idea that the North Carolina Legislature and North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory has imposed on public schools in North Carolina. (See "Education Secretary Takes Heat for Pushing Single Rating of Schools"). He wants states to come up with a "single summative rating for schools or districts" that captures the success or failure of schools in the most simplest way possible.

Of course we all acknowledge state standardized tests can't possibly measure everything that matters. Our state even forbids the use of state test scores as the sole basis of making high-stakes decisions. Yet, as the season of testing falls upon us, the obsession with bubble sheets and number two pencils begins anew. But we need to be reminded that tests are only a small piece of information that matters about our students and our teachers. Before we start scheduling the "Test Prep Pep Rallies" and giving our students those motivational speeches that elevate these tests higher than they should be, we need to be truthful with our students: in the grand scheme of public education, these test scores do not measure what's most important, and the results certainly do not come close to capturing what it means to be an excellent teacher, especially when excellent teachers impact lives more than test scores.

Recently, a Florida teacher wrote this letter to her students just before the onslaught of state tests. I think perhaps it reminds us that testing should always be put in proper perspective, not elevated to some major life goal or achievement. No one is going brag 10 years down the road that they made a "Level 5" on their English End of Course Test or their Biology End of Course Test. As this teacher points out, there are many more things worthwhile to brag about.


"My Dearest Students,

This week you will take your Florida State Assessments (FSA) for reading and math. I know how hard you worked, but there is something important that you must know. The FSA does not assess all of what makes each of you special and unique. The people who create these tests and score them do not know each of you the way I do, and certainly not the way your families do.

They do not know that some of you speak two languages, or that you love to sing or paint a picture. They don't know that your friends can count on you to be there for them, that your laughter can brighten the dreariest day, or that your face turns red when you feel shy. They have not heard you tell differences between a King Cobra and a rattler. They do not know that you participate in sports, wonder about the future, or that sometimes you take care of your little brother or sister after school. They do not know that despite dealing with bad circumstances, you still come to school with a smile. They do not know that you can tell a great story or that really love spending time (baking, hunting, mudding, fishing, shopping...) with special family members and friends. They do not know that you can be very trustworthy, kind or thoughtful, and that you try every day to be your very best.

The scores you will get from this test will tell you something, but they will not tell you everything. There are many ways of being smart. You are smart! You are enough! You are the light that brightens my day! So while you are preparing for this test and while you are in the midst of it all, remember that there is no way to "test" all the amazing and awesome things that make you, YOU!

Thank you for taking the time to read this. Please keep all kids in the state of Florida in your thoughts tomorrow. Thank you."

Here's my own three reminders to educators as we find ourselves on the eve of another "Season of Standardized Testing."

1. As we move into the "Season of Testing" let's remember that we don't teach test-takers; we teach real human beings with interests, hopes, dreams and passions that can't be reduced to multiple-choice questions.

2. As long as students and teachers give us their best, we acknowledge and celebrate that. Celebrate accomplishments such as poems written and published; hours of world-changing community service served; and songs written and sung. Celebrate what the bubble sheets ignore.

3. Keep testing in its place as one piece of data. Don't elevate it needlessly. Don't hold school-wide pep rallies that elevate these things superficially. Leave in their place.

Accountability systems whether in education, business, or government are based on mistrust; a mistrust that those who are its subjects are unable to or unwilling to carry out the jobs they have been assigned. Theodore Porter, author of the book, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, writes:

"Perhaps most crucially, reliance on numbers and quantitative manipulation minimizes the need for intimate knowledge and personal trust."

It stands to reason that when education systems, (or any governmental or business system) come to rely on accountability systems, trust is shifted from the “intimate knowledge" of individuals and their capabilities to systems of numbers and statistics that are declared by the hierarchy in the system as being both more trustworthy and representative of truth. In order words, when there’s an intense distrust that those who occupy production positions in the system, systems of accountability and audit are established in order to force the system to do what it’s designed to do. In education systems, “learning” is the object of production, so naturally accountability systems are designed to force the system, made up of administrators, teachers and students’ to “produce learning.” However, “learning” is an object of contention in the first place, with few people agreeing on what it is.

Even with the disagreement on what learning is and what learning is worthwhile, there is more contention with how to measure “learning" it in a way that accurately captures it. Accountability systems look to tests for this task. Tests are developed, one after another in a fruitless effort to measure this idea of “learning” which is actually an exercise in trying to grab water. Just when educational measurement thinks it has “grasped the learning” that it thinks is significant; it escapes through their fingers. That’s while since the dawn of the accountability era, there have been wave after wave of “new standards and new tests,” all in an effort to try to capture the elusive quarry, “learning.

But I have a novel idea, at least novel in the face of accountability and testing; if teachers are professionals, then what if we were to transform teaching back into a profession where practitioners exercise “professional judgment” to determine whether learning takes place and that the system “trust their judgment"? Teachers could once again be educated to teach and use their judgment to decide whether learning has happened, and be trusted, rather than subjected them and to the mistrust of an accountability and auditing system that fails to capture the nature of “learning” in the first place. This endless pursuit of new standards and new tests that have costs millions and billions of educational funding could be shifted to fostering more effective professional teachers and a teacher professionalization system, that avoids trying to mimic and ill-suited medico-professionalization system, to create its own, never-before-realized profession.

At its heart, we are deforming our education system with both accountability and auditing methods that inadequately define “learning” and by default, are incapable of capturing “effective teaching." The mistrust of the professional educator and “trust in numbers and quantitative manipulation” doesn’t fit the task of teaching. It’s perhaps time to stop trying to make education into the image of either business or medicine, and invent a whole new profession that remembers that teaching and learning are much too complex to reduce to numbers anyway.

To continue my critique of the “accountability and testing regime,” I have been thinking about what the ultimate goals of those whose faith and belief in the promise of standardized testing, statistical technologies, and classroom surveillance are. They have captured the discourse in education and conveniently made unacceptable anything critical anyone else has to say about testing and its high stakes deployment. An educator who questions it is not taken seriously and is deemed out of bounds. Testing and accountability seeks, in a nutshell, to make teaching and learning “measurable, calculable, in order to be controllable."

What does it mean to make teaching and learning “measurable?” It means reducing teaching and learning to “indicators” or “standards” that can simply be determined to be not present or present. It means making teaching and learning into something that can be captured using the available technologies at our disposal, such as teacher observations and standardized testing. Teaching, then, is made measurable by teacher evaluations, and, more recently, using statistical measures such as value-added models, which both result in what is hopefully “objective” and widely accepted as being “true” measures of acceptable teaching and learning, because they happen to be numerical.

As an administrator, I have heard many of my colleagues make the statement, “If it isn’t measurable; it didn’t happen.” That statement captures beautifully the complete faith in testing and measurement that currently exists in education. But it is also a statement of ignorance. Even the best psychometricians will say that “NOT EVERYTHING IN TEACHING AND LEARNING THAT IS WORTHWHILE IS MEASURABLE.” But this faith in “educational measurement” is at the heart of current educational reform, and it is still believed by many educators, politicians, and policymakers to hold the “silver bullet” that will finally make all public education effective. “We just don’t measure enough and measure effectively” is the belief that keeps driving round after round of testing-and-accountability-based reforms” in education. Tests are cheap in comparison to really dealing with the equity issues of healthcare and poverty. With tests and statistical tools, the belief that one can erase these social justice problems, but sadly that is not the case.

For those of us in the schools, those of us in tune with the teachers and students there, we see the results of this: an education system that continues to be distorted and twisted, that ultimately meets the needs of a few, mainly those who can use these “measurable results” to determine their own effectiveness and the effectiveness of their own ideas. An education where test results are still valued over individuals, and any old methodology that results in higher test scores is acceptable. Testing takes precedence over everything else schools do: just look at a state’s testing regulations if you want to see this. In other words, no matter the rhetoric coming from testing and accountability addicts, testing is driving everything in schools, and that’s they way they want it. That keeps them in power and needed.

Making teaching and learning “calculable” is very much akin to making it “measurable.” Making what we do in schools “calculable” is seeking to reduce what we are supposed to be doing to numbers. Somehow, our current system views “numbers” as somehow more objective, therefore superior to other things like judgment or intuition. This desire to make everything “calculable” leads to bizarre decision-making, where outcomes are ridiculously reduced to numerical values, even if those values distort the process and result. Standardized tests do this very well. They can’t measure an “effective essay” for example. Determining whether an essay , or musical composition, or painting is “effective” is by nature a “judgment.” And, whether it is effective in all instances and in all ways is relative. It might be effective at one thing or in one instance, but not another. Rarely are major literary pieces simply “effective for all time” or “in all ways.” The same applies to music, art, and so many other human endeavors. So, in the name of “objectivity,” current testing manics send essays, compositions, and even paintings to “outside” observers to evaluate all in the quest for “objectivity.” But such actions might create a facade of objectivity based on faith, but it completely results in an unfair evaluation of student work. For, who knows better whether a student has progressed than that teacher who has been in the trenches with that student, day after day and seen their incremental growth first-hand. So, the pursuit of making teaching and learning “calculable” is to simply turn it into numerical values or make it have the facade of “objectivity” because the belief is that “numbers don’t lie.” Testing and accountability becomes more about distrust of teachers and their judgments, than really trying to provide an effective education for students. "We can't trust teachers' judgments about students, so must use tests and other outside evaluators," is the rationale.

It is this desire to make teaching and learning both measurable and calculable that leads me to the final goal of accountability and testing as I see it: to make teaching and learning controllable. Policymakers, education reformers, and even politicians all believe they hold the “ultimate vision” of what effective teaching and learning is. They believe, armed with their many contradictory studies on the subject, that they hold the answers. Answers in hand, they seek to control teaching and learning in order to mold it into their image of effectiveness. Through tactics of measurement and calculability based in standardized testing and measurement, they use high stakes decision-making to weed out the “deviant” practices that don’t meet “best practices standards.” The problem lies though with the truth that both teaching and learning is so complex that to reduce it to universal rules of effectiveness ends up distorting it and neutralizing it to simply a “technical knowledge” that anyone can understand, including administrators and policymakers and education reformers who have never spent a day engaging in teaching in classrooms and making decisions about student learning. Teachers, as a result, find themselves engaging in a strangely distorted form of teaching that must jump through the hoops of “best practices” in order to get the “results” desired by this twisted system of education. Teaching the test and test prep are two examples of this distortion. They have become assembly-line workers who “add” knowledge to students as they roll down the assembly-line, and testing with this value-added component is the “quality control mechanism” that drives teachers in the entire system to produce even more “globally competent graduates" that can produce ‘number one test scores’ on international tests such as PISA. Under the testing and accountability regime, teachers are reduced to technicians whose judgement does not count and means nothing. Test results and other “quantitative” measures are hierarchically superior.

In the end, if you wanted to design an education system that turns education into a factory-like system that produces standard results, you couldn’t have done better with that created by our current accountability and testing regime. If you wanted to create a system that transforms and de-professionalizes teaching as a profession, you can’t do much better. In the end, our public education system might ultimately match up to the vision of those who adhere avidly to accountability and testing practices, but I can’t help but wonder whether those teachers in this system find the same level of satisfaction and dedication to students when test results are valued so highly. I also have to wonder what kinds of students such a system of this really produces. Perhaps, that’s what’s desired by accountability and testing advocates: they want students who don’t question; who don’t criticize; who don’t engage in learning deemed irrelevant such as the arts, and learning seen as deviant. They want both students and teachers who “just do their jobs” and not engage in dreams of how things might be different or better.

I feel a bit obligated to explain why there have been so few posts to The 21st Century Principal blog this year. I am continuing my doctoral work through Appalachian State University, so I’ve spent countless hours reading about the French philosopher Michel Foucault and value-added model research. Now I am sure someone might want to ask what could these two subjects possibly have in common?

Well, I am working on a poststructural analysis of current accountability practices. What I hope to be able to do expose even more of the bizarreness behind our continued fetish with using standardized tests to measure everything in education. Somehow, we in the United States just can’t let go of this “If-it-breathes-let’s-test-it approach to education. The faith that if we somehow are able to find “just the right standards” and the “right tests to measure them,” our students will excel in school in life remains strong, and the United States will be number one in international tests, and all our students will find companies just dying to give them high paying jobs because of their superb test performance. I hope you notice the sarcasm.

I just don’t have the time to write blog posts like I was, but I am still reading and writing and learning. And, I am still just as critical of our accountability and testing fetish as ever.

News outlets are reporting everywhere that “SAT Scores Slip Slightly” and “NC’s SAT Scores Drop, Even as More Students Graduate” but does it really mean anything?

Before the state politicians and state educational system leades start to panic, let me make this as clear as I can: IT MEANS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. The SAT is a standardized test and comparing the scores from one year to the next is a meaningless and fruitless exercise. There is no meaning to be gained by even reporting this information. It is about as newsworthy as reporting that it was hot again today and it will be hot again tomorrow!

Educators need to stop responding with panic about the rise and fall of these tests from year to year. Instead, we need to remind everyone of the stupidity of making these comparisons each in the first place. We shouldn’t brag when the SAT scores go up, and we certainly should not accept responsibility when they go down. It is education malpractice to even acknowledge that there is any meaning in comparing national standardized tests from year to year. So what is my administrative and professional response to the SAT scores drop or any national standardized test results? You just read it.

“Every act of measurement loses more information than it gains, closing the box irretrievable and forever on other potentials.” Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science

The problem with accountability and testing lies within a single assumption: “that which is the most important content to be learned can be reduced to a single test or be captured in a test question.” If life were a dance between a, b, c, or d, then standardized tests could capture the essence of learning, and we could be satisfied that a correct or incorrect answer on multiple-choice questions actually tell us whether substantial and important learning has taken place. Sadly though, nothing worth while or lasting can be reduced to that level of simplicity.

As Wheatley points out, when observations, in this case tests, are created, choices are made as to what is to be tested and what is to be ignored. That ‘subjective choice’ reflects all manner of value judgments and decisions regarding importance. Hence, the very ‘subjective nature’ of tests like those being administered is questionable. The observation choices made by those who write the very questions on tests reflect their own subjective choices regarding importance. That’s why no standardized tests are ultimately entirely objective. As Wheatley points out, “Every observation is preceded by a choice about what to observe.” The person who makes those choices are exercising their subjective opinion regarding that is worthwhile to learning and what is most important.

To claim that state standardized tests or any standardized tests are “subjective” masks this fact: these tests reflect the subjective judgment of those whose wrote and designed them. It is simply their opinion regarding what is valuable enough to be tested. Next time someone throws the term “objective measures” or “objective testing” at you, remember this. The quest for ultimate objectivity in testing is a fool’s errand.

Public schools have suffered under Secretary Arne Duncan's Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind law waivers. Testing, not learning has become the focus. Schools have cut arts programs and non-tested subjects. Enormous amounts of time are spent during the school year getting students ready for the tests. And, since the Obama administration took office, there are many states like North Carolina that administer a record number of state tests, and the use those results as a part of teacher evaluations. It has been this President's education policy that has done more to elevate test scores to even higher levels than under No Child Left Behind. 

Now, Arne Duncan is once again trying to elevate test scores even higher: he wants to use test scores to evaluate the effectiveness of teacher programs too.

Under Arne Duncan's latest effort to hold somebody else accountable for education except himself and politicians, Duncan now wants to create a new, massive bureaucratic procedure to judge the "effectiveness" of teacher preparations programs around the country. This behemoth proposal would bizarrely twist test scores once more in the name of accountability. As I read through this proposed procedure, I simply grow more and more angry at a President and Secretary of Education who simply have no clue as to what their "test-them-if-they-breathe" education agenda has done to schools, students, teachers, classrooms, and the future of the education profession. If you read the fine print of this massive document, you can quickly read between the lines regarding what Arne Duncan is actually proposing.

• Using test scores, most likely value-added measures, to determine the effectiveness of teacher preparation programs that receive federal funding.
• The development of a massive pile of red tape and bureaucratic procedures to make sure teacher preparation programs comply to the dictates of the US Department of Education.
• An enormous overreach of federal power and powergrab by the US Department of Education.

What the testing and accountability crowd does not get is the impact teachers have on lives. No bubble sheet can capture that, and you won't find it in standards. Each of us has a teacher or teachers that have impacted our lives. In my own, there was fifth grade with Ms. Case and sixth grade with Ms. Williams. Ms. Case captured my imagination in reading with Old Yeller which she read to us lovingly everyday. Ms. Williams encouraged me to explore my interests in the stars and science. These teachers fired my curiosity for learning and exploration. The impact teachers have on lives can't be measured using EVAAS, ACT, or SAT. As much as we would like to reduce teaching to numbers, it can't be done.

This video of a surprise party for a teacher of 40 years will move you to tears. In spite of the test score fetish our education leaders and politicians have, there are still teachers touching lives. Let's make sure that continues.

Veteran Educator and education writer Marion Brady had some thought provoking words in this recent post on Valarie Strauss' Washington Post Answer Sheet blog. (See "What do standardized tests really measure?") In that post, Brady provides some gems that should provoke more discussion on the damage to public education that is occurring by those who insist, as Brady puts it, "Test scores are infallible indicators of quality."

Yesterday, in my post about how the use of value-added measures in teacher evaluations in Tennessee has perverted both education practice and teacher evaluation, I called these individuals who insist on the "infallibility of test scores" as fundamentalists. The dictionary definition of "fundamentalist" is:

"Fundamentalist: strict adherence to any set of basic ideas or principles"

In the case of the testing fundamentalists, there is a strict adherence in the belief that tests scores are infallible indicators of quality of both teaching and learning. Why they might argue that they don't believe test scores are "infallible," they still use them as if they were infallible.  While I called them "fundamentalists" as a jest in part, but there is some truth to that statement. Too easily educators, politicians, businesses, and the general public have come to view "test scores as indicators of quality" and take the attitude "that numbers don't lie" and that they are "objective" and that belief is driving much of the strict adherence to current testing and accountability reform.

Get into an honest discussion with a true believer in test-scores-as-indicators-of-quality, and they sometimes acknowledge the problems with tests, the testing process. But, and this always happen, they resort to the argument, "Well, that's the best we've got." It's easy to see what's wrong with that argument. Basing the future of a child and a teacher on test scores and defining "teaching quality" as only test score results ignores the real complexity of learning.

When test scores are worshipped (or used in a fundamentalist manner) as the "true and infallible" indicator of teaching and learning quality, both are reduced to simplistic, rote activities. As Brady points out, "Teaching---trying to shape minds---is hard complicated work." But herein is the problem. Those who worship at the altar of bubble sheets, Pearson, and College Board, don't see learning as "trying to shape minds." They see learning as a simple imparting of knowledge from teacher to student. Brady points that out when he says that Bill Gates sees "learning as a product of teaching." By reducing teaching to a process of product delivery in the form of test scores, then all this blather about testing, accountability, and value-added measures makes sense. But if anyone argues against these beliefs that are labeled as "status-quo supporters" as if they were some kind of heretic to question this doctrine.

Test scores are only test scores. They might sometimes tell us something about teaching and learning, and sometimes they tell us more about a student's socioeconomic status, or the kinds of support the child is getting at home. Test scores are and always will be subject to error, and they aren't as "objective" as the true believers believe. We can't use test scores "as if they were infallible indicators of learning."

It was bound to happen sooner or later. Two companies: TeachersMatch and Hanover Research have found a way to use statistics and test scores to develop a model that predicts how effective teacher candidates might be at raising test scores. These kinds of business ventures makes one wonder when the absurdity of this endless pursuit of  test scores is going to end.

In an article entitled, "Companies Offer Big Data Tools to Predict Teacher Candidate's Impact," by Education Week, Benjamin Herold describes how these two companies have developed "new algorithm-driven teacher selection tools" that can predict the impact that teacher candidates will have on student test scores. The companies, according to Herold, have already signed up nearly two dozen districts and charter organizations. There are definitely plenty of suckers out there. But Peter Dodge, founder and CEO of Hanover Research, stated clearly what is at the heart of this absurd business idea:

"Public schools are slowly being dragged into a more business-like state of mind."

Dodge concedes that he would like to enlist a couple hundred districts and obtain about $10 million in annual business. Never mind whether or not what he's selling is really good for education.

From my perspective as a veteran educator there is so much wrong with this kind of venture, I don't know where to begin. There is at the heart of this some faulty assumptions that would make me totally dismiss TeachersMatch and Hanover Research's "new product" as snake oil and poison that should be totally ignored.

• Assumption that test scores are proxies for student achievement. Tests we currently use are imperfect and do not represent all that students should learn and be able to do. In fact, I am not of the faith when it comes to tests: I do not believe it possible to develop such tests. This "get-rich" scheme dreamed up by these two companies falsely assume test scores are the final say on student achievement.
• Assumption that the ability to increase test scores equals good teaching. This is a simplified view of teaching that business leaders and economists have of teaching. Teaching and learning is much too complex to be reduced to this simple equation. It doesn't take much to raise test scores if you teach to the test. High test scores are not always an indicator of good teaching, unless you view teaching as primarily getting high test scores.
• Assumption that schools are like businesses. This statistical money-making scheme dreamed up by TeacherMatch and Hanover Research smells and stinks of corporate education reform at its worst. It assumes that schools are businesses, which they never have been. Schools don't operate like businesses on so many levels, that this kind of thinking is actually detrimental.

A headline on this morning's News and Observer Website read: "NC Schools Deal with Fewer Dollars for Textbooks."  According to the article, textbook funding has been cut by 80 percent or more over the past four years. This cut, coupled with cuts in instructional supply money, teaching assistant cuts, among a whole laundry list of cuts makes it very clear that North Carolina public education is not a funding priority for our state legislature or governor. 

What is even more amazing is how our state is able to afford the largest increase in the number of state tests administered in state history, yet instructional materials and textbooks have been increasingly cut each year. What's wrong with this picture? Here's some points for thought.

• The expectation in our state is that teachers will provide ever increasing levels of high quality instruction while doing so with less and less instructional tools for the classroom.
• In the midst of it all, our state still manages to find funding to administer over 40 (the number depends on which tests you count and whose taking them) tests to all students during the course of the year. Now I realize the argument the testing and accountability supporters will make here is that "Testing is cost effective and that it just doesn't cost that much to give tests." Perhaps that's true, but if our state politicians and state level education bureaucrats were all that serious about providing a quality education for the students of North Carolina, then you would see the same level of commitment to provide adequate funding for textbooks, technology, and instructional materials for the classrooms. Why can't they muster the same enthusiasm and commitment for providing texts and classroom materials that they have for testing?
• It is cheaper to test, test, test than it is to fund classrooms. That's the reality. The state can easily churn out a new test or contract with College Board to give one more test, but to provide adequate texts,technology and instructional materials for the classroom is costly. But the logic behind this fails me. If you really want to impact classroom instruction, then put the money where it will do the most  good: the classroom, not additional tests and the testing bureaucracy that goes along with them. The most recent survey done by Marketplace Morning Report found that 99.5 percent of teachers paid an average of $485 to stock their classrooms the previous year.
• No teacher should ever have to spend their own personal money so that they can carry out instruction in their classrooms. Teachers are really dedicated people who work very hard for the most part. Many, many teachers spend their own money on school supplies for their classrooms just to be able to provide their students with engaging and meaningful learning. Yet, our state seems to always find funding to add a new test or develop some kind of new data program. Perhaps it's time to fund what really counts: classroom instruction.

“Developing better tests of student learning in the 21st century is as futile as attempting to find a faster horse and buggy would have been in the 20th century.” Douglas Reeves, “A Framework for Assessing 21st Century Skills”

After last night’s #ncadmin chat about “21st Century Teaching and Learning” I could not stop thinking about questions regarding 21st century skills and assessment.  One question continues to haunt me: "How can we devise an assessment for 21st century skills?" That question made me recall an essay I once read by Douglas Reeves entitled, “A Framework for Assessing 21st Century Skills.”

According to Reeves, It is “not possible to reconcile the demands of 21st century skills with the realities of the traditional testing environment.” The very conditions demanded by our current testing regimen is antithetical to the 21st century skills we want our students to have. As Reeves points out, our assessment practices lag behind “because they are bound by three destructive conditions: standardized conditions, secrecy of content, and individual results.”  These three testing conditions are destructive to our efforts to teach and assess 21st century skills because they were designed in a different era of education. To assess our students' 21st century skills we need an entirely different set of tools. I realize the new testing consortia are exploring "new generation assessments" but I fear they will not let go of those 20th century obsessions with student score comparisons and standardization that make current testing inadequate for assessing 21st century skills.

According to Reeves, there are three qualities of assessment that form a framework for any 21st century assessments we need.

• We need assessment conditions that are variable rather than standardized. The whole idea behind the 20th century idea of standardization is having the ability to “compare students.” Policymakers and politicians, in their demands for accountability, consider the only way to have that accountability is by being able to compare students’ scores. So, in order to make those comparisons, students are herded into the same kind of room environment, given the same kind of pencils, the same scrap paper, the same bubble sheet, and the same amount of time to complete the test. Standardizing the test conditions take precedence over everything, even the needs of the kids. As Reeves points out, in these kinds of conditions “students are rewarded for memorization and following established rules,” not for being creative and being innovative. These standardized conditions worked well in 20th century assessments designed to sort and classify students, but 21st century assessments need to allow for the variability inherent in the messiness of creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. Students need to be able to demonstrate that they can solve problems, not in the “manufactured, controlled” environment of a standardized testing room. They need to be able to demonstrate they can solve problems not limited by the conditions standardized testing impose. Being able to draw a diagram, collaborate by speaking to experts, watching videos, read books, and access web databases are not possible in standardized testing conditions, but in the real world, those are the tools people use to solve problems. If we are going to assess students’ 21st century skills, we are going to have to give up the obsessions for comparison of student scores and standardized testing conditions to provide assessment conditions akin to the real-world environments that people use to solve problems.
• We need assessment of students as teams rather than as individuals. Since collaboration is a cornerstone of 21st century skills, we need to stop testing students in isolated silos, and assess their skills the way real world people solve problems, through collaboration. If our students are asked to engage in creativity, problem-solving, and entrepreneurial thinking in the manner that real-world people do, our assessments may need to move from the individual to the collaborative. Instead of passing out bubble sheets to each student, cutting them off from the real world, and demanding they choose the "correct" answers to problems, 21st century assessments need to have students work in teams to analyze and devise solutions to multi-layered problems that do not fit in the confines of answers A,B,C, or D.  Once again, doing this means giving up the obsessions with comparing student scores and standardization.
• We need assessments whose content is public rather than secret. I can’t speak for other states, but my own state of North Carolina protects test content almost obsessive-compulsively as Milton Waddams protects his stapler in the movie Office Space (See Photo Below). Teachers and students are kept totally in the dark about what is going to be on test, leaving them to scrounge around and make all kinds of wild speculations about that content. Teachers are forced to play a game of Concentration as they try to guess what the state is going to ask next. North Carolina testing experts claim their test is derived from the state’s curriculum, but that curriculum is so broad, it makes this kind of testing a game, trying to decide which part of the curriculum will be on the test. As Reeves points out, 21st century assessments require that the kinds of learning we want students to do, be public. Students must be able to study those assessment ideas, and they may even devise their own assessments, or demonstrations of learning. But once again, being open about test content means giving up this obsession with comparing student scores and standardization.

As Douglas Reeves argues, our insistence on comparing students test scores and standardization are serious obstacles to developing 21st century skills assessments. The old standardization model demands too many conditions that are antithetical to 21st century learning. School leaders need to have the courage to ask the tough questions of those who advocate for the “testing status quo.” As Reeves points out, “Educational leaders cannot talk about the need for collaboration, problem-solving, critical thinking, and creativity and at the same time leave teachers and school administrators fenced in by obsolete assessment mechanisms, policies, and assumptions.”

Too many politicians, policymakers, school leaders, and educators are protecting the “testing status quo” and refuse to relinquish those very conditions that keep us from fully transforming our schools. We have fenced ourselves into having 20th century schools by our own 20th century assessments and obsession for standardization and comparison of student test scores. Letting go of the “testing-status-quo” is an enormous step toward a 21st century education system.

A veteran teacher once told me in the early days of my career as an educator, "Be careful what you wish for. When federal and state agenices do away with one policy, they almost always come up with something much worse." In my naivete, I obviously did not believe that. I still had an unwavering faith in the system, and that those who make the rules always mean well and often know more about those things than I do. Now, 20 some years after that conversation, I have to admit, my old friend had many things right. When our policymakers and politicians do reform, revise, revamp, or scuttle an education policy, the result is always something much worse. Our current example of this? The Obama administration's transformation of No Child Left Behind to Race to the Top and the whole series of waivers states can apply for to escape the sanctions of NCLB, which most everyone agrees is a bad law, but a paralyzed federal government can't agree on how to fix. Take North Carolina as an example.

The one lesson politicians should have learned from No Child Left Behind, is that when all of your energies and resources are turned to just improving test scores, failure is the result.  As education historian Diane Ravitch states eloquently in her book, The Death and the Life of the Great American School System, ”Our schools will not improve if we rely exclusively on tests as the means of deciding the fate of students, teachers, principals, and schools.” Sadly, I’m not sure our current political leaders have learned the lesson yet that schools will not improve by solely focusing on using test scores and standards to improve them.

Our national education policy is still dominated by a “test-centric” approach to reform that ignores so many other factors that impact education such as poverty, inadequate health care, and lack of gainful employment. According to education scholar Linda Darling-Hammond, “The United States has the highest poverty rate for children among industrialized nations,” (The Flat World and Education, Linda Darling-Hammond, 2010). We want to “Race to the Top” but we’re looking for short cuts to get there. We want standards and “better tests” but we don’t want to engage in the hard, difficult work of addressing poverty, lack of health care, lack of good, affordable housing, and lack of opportunity for jobs with living wages. As long as national education policy is driven by a blind belief in test results and national standards, 10 years from now, we will be either staring at the same dismal  conditions both educationally and economically if we’re lucky, or we will be much worse with a society with an even wider gap between those that have and those that have not.

What then is the answer? Just how bad are things in different parts of the country? This morning I stumbled upon a 5-year initiative by the American Federation of Teachers and partners like Cisco, Blue Cross Blue Shield, College Board, among many others, that focuses on the educational improvement of an entire community ravaged by unemployment, lost opportunity and lost promise. McDowell County West Virginia has not fared well at all since 1980 and that community is the focus of this initiative.


While it is easy to become entangled in the debate about the role of teachers unions in education when debating education policy, I think it is admirable that the AFT and its partners are putting into practice what they’ve been trying to make politicians understand all along; education reform must do more than focus on test scores and standards. It has to also address the dreadful conditions some of our fellow US citizens find themselves living in.

With this post, I am not taking sides in the debate about unions per se. I do believe, after 20+ years experience, and seeing countless students struggling to live in forgotten communities without the basics most of us take for granted, that the answer to our problems as a country lies, not in investing in more and different tests, or in national standards, but in focusing on the crushing problems facing our poorest students.

After watching the video below about “Reconnecting McDowell” I was reminded of an incident that happened in one of the schools where I once worked. I walked by a table during lunch one day, and a young 11 year old girl sat there with her head down. She had enormous tears in her eyes. I walked up, leaned down and asked her to step out the lunchroom for a minute. Once out of the hearing of others, I asked, “What’s wrong?” Through her tears, she blurted, “I don’t have any lunch money. My parents didn’t have any to give me.” She proceeded to tell me that when she went through the lunch line, the cafeteria took her plate away and refused to serve her lunch because she owed so much money. I took her back through the lunch line and told her to get anything she wanted, and that it would be taken care of. You can debate all you want about why a child does not have money to eat. You can accuse her parents of not taking care of her, but the reality for her is she was not going to be able to eat that day, and a focus on raising her test scores was not going to change that reality.

As I understand it, Reconnecting McDowell is an effort to try to improve the education of a community, and not do it by just focusing on test scores. It is an effort to focus on poverty, healthcare, housing, and  a broken community. I have been to McDowell County West Virginia and have seen firsthand all that the video describes. That is why this effort caught my attention. Poverty is real, and those of us who have worked in schools where it exists know its faces.


Link to Reconnecting McDowell Web Site.

Diane Ravitch recently was interviewed by Dan Rather on HDNet. During that interview, she emphasized several things the public needs to know about the current state of public schools.

• "No Child Left Behind has set our public schools on the road to destruction." I have often wondered if the true motivation behind that legislation was to simply make sure schools fail so that arguments for privatization would be stronger. Perhaps that's not the true intent of the law, but it has been the result.
• No Child Left Behind, with its tremendous emphasis on testing, has not succeeded in teaching anybody anything. It has turned schools into test-prep centers, where the only thing that matters is the scores. The scores even matter more than the students.
• Tests should not be used to make high stakes decisions. Our politicians around the country are doing just that. Florida is basing whether a student is promoted on "the test." Many more states have adopted merit pay schemes and tenure schemes that are tied to testing. It would seem that politicians have more faith in these tests than the ones who give them every year.

Check out Diane Ravitch's interview below.




No Child Left Behind has been a disaster. Those of us who have worked in schools that received the infamous label of "AYP-Not Met" know first hand how all focus turns to "the test." Students are asked to give up electives such as art or music so they can attend "one more tutoring session." It really is sad that we do that  to our kids.

When I started teaching about twenty years ago, a veteran teacher once told me when I elatedly said that I was glad our state government was changing some education regulation, “Be careful what you wish for. What they often come up with is often worse than what we have.” Twenty years later, that veteran teacher’s fear is alive and well inside my head as discussions heat up about the re-authorization of No Child Left Behind. I have long suspected that the original motivations behind the No Child Left Behind legislation was to set public schools up so that they automatically fail. Why else would you set up the totally ridiculous and impossible standard of having all students proficient by 2014. It does not take someone with the intelligence of a rocket scientist to see that having ALL students proficient by that deadline is not going to happen, ever. In fact, you could set that standard deadline for 2050 and it will never happen. I realize to some idealists that statement sounds pessimistic coming from a school administrator who should have high expectations for all students, but as the discussion about NCLB re-authorization heats up, I honestly think this country is in desperate need of a reality check.

Let’s face it, education is an extremely messy process. Contrary to what all the politicians behind NCLB or its re-authorization think or believe, education is not a business. Education is not a factory. NCLB has a basic assumption that education can be a business or a factory. The discussions about the re-authorization of the legislation and this “Race-to-the-Top” rhetoric still have the same basic assumptions at their core. For example, the discussion of national standards and national tests to measure those standards is only extension of the same factory-model view of learning. The difference now is that states like Tennessee and Texas are going to directly tie teacher performance to test score performance. That should be a frightening prospect to all educators. Not because we do not want to take responsibility for our students’ learning, but because there are so many environmental factors about learning that we do not control. For example, we do not even control our own budgets which means we ultimately do not control the resource stream into our classrooms and schools. Yet, there are those who tie student performance on tests to teacher performance. That is clearly a sign of the delusional factory-model thinking of our political establishment.

I do think we must take responsibility for our students’ learning, and I am not just making excuses by pulling the environment card. But, instead of tumbling headlong into the next standards and accountability fad, we must also back up and critically look at the entire accountability and standards movement and what is has done to education as a whole, and to our teachers and students specifically. No matter what anyone says, we have an educational system that “teaches to the test.” Some might argue that this is not a problem, but anyone who has actually worked with these high-stakes tests know their many limitations. In a sense, we are basing a child’s entire future and a teacher’s on a test. That is frightening!

Where then is this current standards and accountability push taking us? Will we have national standards and a national test that determines the fate of both students and teachers in this country? Perhaps instead of “racing to the top” we need to walk for a bit to assess our ideas. If we do not do that, I am afraid what that veteran teacher told me long ago is true. “Be careful what you wish for. What our government and educational establishment develops to replace what we have is often worse than what we had before.”