11/17/04

Drive-thru Education

If you're a regular reader of the comic, then you may have noticed I am developing a tendancy to gain mileage from my general dislike of standardized testing and the way it is applied to modern education.  I want to make it clear that I am not in any way against standardized testing as a tool for measuring student aptitudes and achievements.  I just disapprove of the weight which such testing receives today.  I am also mystified and frustrated by the butthole-stupid ways in which the No-Child-Left-Behind and other perfectly reasonable (in theory) attempts at improving the American educational system have been applied.  Let me explain.

Building With a Hammer
Standardized tests are, as I said, a tool.  One tool.  I do a lot of woodworking.  In my shop I have five tools which I use regularly and some 35 additional tools I use more infrequently (not counting paints and finishes).  And most of my stuff is just square or mildly angled boxes for holding things.  I think a human mind is a vastly more complex item than anything I can create in my little woodshop.  Why then, is our educational system banking all of its resources on a single tool?
          And it is a flawed tool, by all accounts.  By the very nature of standardization, it must be multiple choice.  Vaguaries of interpretation and inconsistencies of educators' priorities rule out almost all other testing formats (and I use inconsistency of priorities to mean that different educators have different priorites of what information is pertinent, not in any way to suggest that individual educators across the spectrum have inconsistent priorities).  Essay and short answer exams are both extremely vulnerable to both variables, leading to uneven results.  Fill-in-the-blank exams are subject to difficulties of interpretation.  Only multiple-choice exams meet the requirements of standardization.
          But do they test knowledge?  I had a teacher once, who explained testing methods thusly:  Essays test your understanding, short answers test your comprehension, fill-in-the-blanks test your memory, and multiple choice exams test your ability to pick the correct answer out of a line-up.  College students tend not to even bother studying for mutlile choice tests, referring to them as "multiple guess" and counting on what they've gleaned from lectures to stick with them long enough to squeak by. 
          Tests themselves are an inherently flawed means of gauging education.  To base a system's assessment of a student or a school on a single day of high-pressure performance is tantamount to basing the NFL chamionship on a single drive from a single game.  I'm sorry Mr. Favre, you failed to get a touchdown in the four downs alotted, you'll have to redo college ball until you can improve, and we'll be cutting back on Green Bay's league subsidy until they show they can produce a higher quality of quarterback.

All Icing and no Cake
I'm not sure what sort of arcane formula is used to tie school funding to these tests; I'm pretty sure it's not a direct points-to dollars conversion.  I'm also pretty sure it's prioritized the wrong way.  Schools with better score get more state and federal money.  Shouldn't the schools that aren't producing the scores get more attention and more help to improve their scores?  I mean, even if the aid given only takes the form of student loan write-offs for new teachers willing to teach in the school for a certain number of years, that will certainly help to cure most of the problems that plague low-score schools (teacher shortages and, by extension of that, class sizes). 
          Funding tied to scores, even in the arcane manner currently exercised, only reducse the time spent on actual education in favor of "teaching to the test".  Mind you, when I decry teaching to the test, I am not accusing teachers of failing in their trust.  Teachers hate doing that.  Without exception, the teachers I personally know all entered the field for one (or, more likely, both) of two reasons:  they love their field, they like kids and feel a responsibility toward them.  You ask a Physics teacher whether he'd rather present a finely-crafted unit on the application of Newton's laws to real life or spew out yet another pre-packaged treatise on the scientific method and see if I'm wrong.
          Even front-line administrators hate the idea of teaching to a test.  Principals and assistant principals, for the most part, would rather allow their teachers the freedom to create units that encouraged and challenged their students.  They know that assembly-line education leads to bored and frustrated students, which leads to a higher rate of disruptions and disciplinary trouble.
          The upshot is, that it's not working.  We're basing our system on a flawed process that debases the process and removes discretionary authority from those with the experience and exposure necessary to make the right choices.  It's a move in the wrong direction.  The rot at the core of our education system is not the teachers' willingness to educate, it is in their ability.  We have hobbled our teachers for a long time, now, and modern initiatives only serve to hamstring them as well.  We have to go back to where it started going wrong to fix it. 
          I'll write about that, next week.