Beware of the Standards, Not Just the Tests
by Alfie Kohn
- http://www.alfiekohn.org
September 26, 2001
-
Reprinted from Education Week
A number of prominent
educators are finally raising their voices against
standardized testing---particularly
multiple-choice, norm-referenced tests;
particularly tests with "high stakes" (read: bribes and threats)
attached; and particularly in the
context of a federal mandate to force every state to
test every student in grades 3-8
every year. Yet even as more opinion leaders
come to understand the damage attributable to
testing mania, it is still rare to
hear objections to the standards movement as a whole.
The Learning First
Alliance, a coalition of leading education groups,
cautiously raised concerns about the tests not long ago, but
mostly out of fear that the
burgeoning grassroots opposition might bring down the state
standards, too. Education Week's 2001
edition of Quality Counts likewise worried
that tests "are overshadowing" and "do not
adequately reflect" the standards. Major
conferences carry titles such as "Standards: From Theory to
Practice" and "Will Standards Survive the Classroom?" (You will
look in vain for conferences called "Will
Classrooms Survive the Standards?" or
"Standards: From Capitulation to Resistance.") A
list of boat-rocking books on the subject
begins and pretty much ends with Susan
Ohanian's One Size Fits Few and Deborah
Meier's Will Standards Save Public
Education? Alarms have been quietly raised by Nel Noddings, Elliot
Eisner, James Beane, and a few other eminent educators in the
pages of Phi Delta Kappan. Otherwise, the
field seems to have closed ranks around the
idea that it is permissible to criticize the tests, but not the
standards.
Indeed, test opponents are
sternly reminded to avoid confusing the two, as
though they were in fact unrelated. I
want to argue not only that they are
inextricably connected---the tests serving, at least in
theory, as the enforcement mechanism
of the standards---but also that the latter may be
every bit as problematic as the
former.
Of course, it's reasonable
to ask just what kind of standards are at issue
here. The most relevant and widely
accepted distinction is between outcome and
content. Outcome standards specify how well students must
do. At the highest level of
generality ("We support high standards"), the notion is
unobjectionable but not terribly
useful. When translated into specifics, it
comes to mean cut scores on standardized tests and
becomes downright dangerous. Outcome
standards to a remarkable extent are based on confusing
harder with better, an error I have
already discussed in these pages and need
not belabor. ("Confusing Harder With
Better," Commentary, Sept. 15, 1999.)
Content standards, by
contrast, specify what students will be taught. Rather
than declaring that all such
standards are bad---or, as is far more common,
accepting all such standards uncritically---I propose that we
judge a given set of standards or
frameworks according to four criteria: How
specific? There are many reasons
policymakers seek to impose detailed
curriculum mandates. They may fundamentally distrust
educators: Much of the current
standards movement is just the latest episode in a long, sorry
history of trying to create a
teacher-proof curriculum. Alternatively, they
may simply assume that more specificity is
always preferable. In reality, just
because it makes sense to explain to a waiter exactly how I'd like my
burger cooked doesn't mean it's better to declare that students
will study the perimeter of polygons (along
with scores of other particular topics)
than it is to offer broad guidelines for helping students learn
to think like mathematicians.
The latter sort of
standards, supported by practical guidance, can help
students reason carefully,
communicate clearly, and get a kick out of doing
so. But long lists of facts and skills that teachers must cover
may have the opposite effect. Thus,
when Harold Howe II, the U.S. commissioner of
education under President Johnson,
was asked what a set of national standards
should be like (if we had to adopt them), he
summarized a lifetime of wisdom in four
words: they should be "as vague as possible." His
caution applies to state standards as well.
On the one hand, thinking is messy, and deep
thinking is very messy. On the other hand,
standards documents are nothing if not
orderly. Keep that contrast in mind and you
will not be surprised to see how much damage
those documents can do in real classrooms.
Considerable research has
demonstrated the importance of making sure
students are actively involved in designing
their own learning, invited to play a role
in formulating questions, creating projects, and so on. But
the more comprehensive and detailed a
list of standards, the more students (and
even teachers) are excluded from this
process, the more alienated they tend to
become, and the more teaching becomes a race
to cover a huge amount of material. Thus,
meeting these kinds of standards may actually have the
effect of dumbing down classrooms. As Howard Gardner and his
colleagues wisely observed, "The greatest
enemy of understanding is 'coverage.'"
Some insist that these
lists of facts and skills don't prescribe how
students will be taught; the standards are
said to be neutral with respect to
pedagogy. But this is nonsense. If the goal is to cover material
(rather than, say, to discover ideas), that
unavoidably informs the methods that will be
used. Techniques such as repetitive
drill-and-practice are privileged by
curriculum frameworks based on a "bunch o' facts" approach to
education. Of course, that kind of teaching is also driven by
an imperative to prepare students for tests,
but no less by an imperative to conform to
specific standards.
Some people sincerely
believe that to teach well is to work one's way
through a list of what someone
decided every nth grader ought to know. But
the question is not just what you or I think about that model;
the question is whether that model
should enjoy virtual monopoly status in American
public schools. In effect, one
particular, very debatable philosophy of
education has been enshrined in state standards
documents and has become the law of
the land.
How quantifiable? The
current accountability fad insists on mandates that
are not only overly detailed but
chosen according to whether they lend
themselves to easy measurement. It's not just that the tests are
supposed to be tied to the standards;
it's that the standards have been selected on the
basis of their testability. The
phrase "specific, measurable standards"
suggests a commitment not to excellence but to
behaviorism. It is telling that this
phrase is heard most often from corporate officials and
politicians, not from leading
educational theorists or cognitive scientists.
We are talking about a worldview in which any
aspect of learning, or life, that
resists being reduced to numbers is regarded as vaguely suspicious. By
contrast, anything that appears in numerical form seems
reassuringly scientific; if the numbers are
getting larger over time, we must be making
progress. Concepts like intrinsic motivation and intellectual
exploration are difficult for some minds to
grasp, whereas test scores, like sales
figures or votes, can be calculated and
charted and used to define success and
failure.
Unfortunately, meaningful
learning does not always proceed along a single
dimension, such that we can nail down
the extent of improvement. As Linda McNeil
of Rice University has observed, "Measurable outcomes
may be the least significant results
of learning." (That sentence ought to be printed
out in 36-point Helvetica, framed,
and tacked to the wall of every school
administrator's office in the country.) To talk about what
happens in schools as moving forward
or backward in specifiable degrees is not only
simplistic, in the sense that it
fails to capture what is actually going on;
it is destructive, because it can change what is going on for
the worse. Consider a comment
made by Sandra Stotsky, the deputy commissioner of
education in Massachusetts: "Explore
isn't a word that can be put into a standard
because it can't be assessed." What if we
really were faced with a trade-off between an emphasis on exploration
in the classroom and the
demands of measurement? Most thoughtful educators would
unhesitatingly choose the former, whereas
those who write and enforce state
standards often opt for the latter. Clearly, it is much easier to
quantify the number of times a semicolon has
been used correctly in an essay than it is
to quantify how well the student has
explored ideas in that essay. Thus, the more
emphasis that is placed on picking standards that
are measurable, the less ambitious
the teaching will become.
How uniform? We have heard
the phrase "standardized testing" so often that
we may have become inured to the
significance of that first word. To what
extent do we really want our students to receive a
standardized education? At a national
conference last fall, a consultant announced with apparent
satisfaction that now, thanks to
standards-based reform, "for the first time
in my experience, people on a grade level, in
a subject area, or teaching a course
at a high school are [feeling] a responsibility to all have the same
destination." That she did not even feel it necessary to defend
this goal says something about the current
acceptance of a one-size-fits-all model of
education. Once again, the
problem is not just with the construction of
the tests, but with the uniformity of the
standards. Wanting to make sure that students in
low-income communities don't receive a second-rate education is
a laudable objective. Wanting to make
sure that all students in your state receive the
same education, such that they are treated as
interchangeable recipients of
knowledge, is a very different matter. Even more troubling are
grade-by-grade standards. Here, the
prescribers are not just saying, "We expect
students to know the following stuff by the
time they're in 8th grade," but "We expect
them to learn all the items on this list in 5th
grade, all the items on that list in
6th grade," and so on. Apart from the
negative effects on learning, this rigidity about both the
timing of the instruction and its
content creates failures unnecessarily by trying to
force all children to learn at the
same pace.
Guidelines or mandates?
There are standards offered as guidelines ("See if
this way of thinking about teaching
can help you improve your craft"), and then
there are standards presented as mandates ("Teach
this or else"). Virtually all the
states have chosen the latter course. The effect has been
not only to control teachers, but to
usurp the long-established power of local
school districts to chart their own course. If there
has ever been a more profoundly
undemocratic school reform movement in U.S. educational
history than what is currently taking
place in the name of standards, I haven't
heard of it.
Bullying reaches its
apotheosis with high-stakes testing, the use of crude
rewards and punishments to make
people ratchet up the scores. The underlying
logic is captured by an ironic sign spotted on a classroom wall:
"The beatings will continue until
morale improves." But the standards themselves,
if handed down as requirements,
embody that same determination on the part
of policymakers to do things to educators and
students rather than to work with
them. My nominee for the most chillingly Orwellian word now in
widespread use is "alignment"---as in, How can we make teachers
"align" their teaching to the state
standards? A remarkable number of people,
including some critics of high-stakes testing, have casually
accepted this sort of talk despite
the fact that it is an appeal to naked power.
"Alignment" isn't about
improvement; it's about conformity.
Standards-as-mandates also
imply a rather insulting view of
educators---namely, that they need to be told
what (and, by extension, how) to
teach by someone in authority because otherwise they wouldn't know.
While plenty of teachers need help,
virtually everyone is likely to resist having
the state try to micromanage his or
her classroom. Some will do their best to
ignore the standards, while others will comply resentfully.
Either way, the use of control leads
to poor implementation of the standards (which,
come to think of it, may not be such
a bad thing). Others, including some of our
best educators, will throw up their hands in disgust
and find another career.
Based on these four
criteria, the standards promulgated by disciplinary
groups (the councils of teachers of
mathematics and English, for example) come
out considerably better than the standards issued by states.
This
doesn't preclude our objecting to certain aspects of the former
documents, of course, nor does it mean
that all state standards are equally bad, as a
side-by-side comparison of, say, Minnesota's Profile of
Learning and Virginia's Standards of
Learning will confirm.
Currently, however, there
is considerable pressure to implement the kind of
standards that I am suggesting are
the worst. Chester E. Finn Jr. and his
colleagues want states to spell out "which books children should
read in English class, which
individuals and events to study in history, and so on";
any other standards are simply
"fluff." Pro-standards groups such as Achieve
Inc. (a group of corporate officials and politicians) tend
to give poor ratings to states whose
standards aren't sufficiently specific, measurable,
uniform, or compulsory.
The difference between
these evaluations and a report by, say, the National
Rifle Association that assigns low
grades to legislators who are not
sufficiently pro-gun is that in the latter case everyone realizes the
ratings reflect a specific and very debatable point of view. By
contrast, those who mark down a state for
granting too much autonomy to local school
boards, or for having standards that wouldn't satisfy
behaviorists, would like us to accept
this as an objective evaluation. (One could make a case
that states given an A in annual
evaluations really deserve an F, and vice
versa---or that a state should commission a
review of its standards and testing policy
by one of these groups and then do precisely the opposite of
what is recommended.)
An important side note
here: There has been some grumbling lately about the
use of off-the-shelf tests that are
unrelated to the state's standards
documents---for example, in California. From a psychometric
perspective, this practice doesn't
make much sense. From a pedagogical perspective,
though, the only thing worse than
tests that aren't aligned to the standards
are tests that are aligned to the standards. The former
is silly because it is inefficient,
while the latter is dangerous precisely because it is
efficient ... at accomplishing a
dubious goal. Not only politicians, but also
some assessment experts sometimes forget that
doing something well is not the same
as doing something that's worthwhile. When the standards and
tests fit together perfectly to
create an airtight system of top-down,
uniform, "bunch o' facts" schooling---well,
that's when we're really in trouble.
The tests arguably
constitute the most serious and immediate threat to good
teaching, such that freeing educators
and students from their yoke should be our
top priority. But we should not limit our critique to the
testing, which is, after all, one
manifestation of a larger, and seriously wrong-headed,
approach to pedagogy and school
reform.
I am not troubled by those
who disagree with my criteria or who like a given
set of standards more than I do. In
fact, I welcome such challenges. What
troubles me is the rarity of such discussion, the absence of
questioning, the tendency to offer
instruction about how to teach to the standards before
we have even asked whether doing so
is a sound idea.