I worked with urban school districts in the San Francisco bay area where teachers learned PBL. Then NCLB and accountability issues. Open Court even had an accountability program who visited the schools each week to see if the teachers were on page 262 on Thursday and the bulletin boards had to reflect what was being taught and tested. Veteran teachers are leaving – frustrated. This is not what they signed up for. New teachers (and parents and administrators) in the school system for the last 5 years only know this type of teaching practice. I talked to some very educated parents from the Oakland hills who think this is the right way to teach their students. In some of these really poor schools (where we don’t want to leave any kids behind) there are no more class sets of books unless the teachers purchase them.

So now standardized tests in universities. I work with several universities. Let’s be real. This is not going to work. That is unless you teach the faculty to all think alike. They don’t. I’m working with a several faculty at one university who are all teaching the same course. They worked together to design the curriculum. However, they have their own teaching styles: some use Web 2.0 tools, others are still stand and deliver lecturers. There are some that give multiple choice tests but most ask their students to do research, write a paper, create a presentation, etc.

I am hoping this testing and accountability movement changes to encourage critical thinking, problem-solving, inquiry, and creativity, so we get back to real learning.

Quote of the Day
You can never plan the future by the past.
Edmund Burke

Ironic.

Our district does very well on NY State ELA (English Language Arts) tests in the lower elementary grades, not very well on the middle school assessments. Our students don’t wake up “dumber” after a few years. The skills the test measures are not the skills they need to be successful. And as a scorer, I can tell you that the bar is set very low indeed on some of these tests: if a student writes a single word of intelligible English, even if that word makes no sense in the context of the question, a “1″, rather than a “0″ must be awarded as the score (on a range of 0 – 4). The tests fail to adequately assess correct grammar and usage; critical thinking, collaboration, communication don’t even enter into the equation.

Education seem to have conveniently forgotten the technology component of NCLB. We are testing the wrong skills with the wrong tools. Our standards are out of date and out of synch with the world as it is today. Will we ever get it straight?

The best anecdote I have is from my own life… three YEARS after I took a philosophy class, I found all the principles I learned there gelling with everything I was learning in my major. All the thinking muscles I’d developed in that class had finally become a habit of mind. Immediately at the end of the class, I was frustrated and my brain ached and I hated everything – it was an opaque and confusing process. But later on, it came together for me. I continue to benefit from that professor and her class.

How on EARTH will universities measure that sort of breakthrough?