Guest Blog by Dr. Jill Sunday Bartoli, Emerita, Elizabethtown College, PA
Stephen Krashen’s call for less weighing–more feeding is excellent, but he does not mention the sordid historical, political and profiteering purposes of testing that maintain it. In the past we used testing to keep millions of Eastern Europeans from entering the country, many of whom were fleeing pogroms. We used testing to build the eugenics movement forcing sterilization on the “feebleminded.”
We use testing to drive African American and Latino students out of school and into prisons, as Michelle Alexander details in The New Jim Crow. Excess testing helps to build the school to prison pipeline for those who most need good teaching and strong relationship building, because time is stolen from classrooms for impersonal, meaningless test prep and testing.
What Dewey called a democratic, experiential education, vital for all citizens of a democracy, is endangered. While governors and legislators take credit for making schools and teachers “accountable,” we are sacrificing the foundation of our democracy—a well informed, critical thinking citizenry capable of collaboration and cooperation.
Politicians use test scores to justify de-funding and dismantling public schools, denying equal educational opportunity to 85% of US children. Choice, charter schools and vouchers work for under 15% of students, yet millions are directed to non-public schools. Meanwhile we are #1 in child poverty and juvenile incarceration, and declining internationally in education.
More testing benefits corporations selling tests, test prep materials, and test aligned textbooks. Students and teachers are robbed of classroom time better spent on thoughtful, creative projects, personally meaningful writing, math and science experiments, and teacher observation and mediation in the on-going learning processes of their students.
Pulling students out of a rich learning environment for de-contextualized one-right-answer, multiple guess standardized tests will never move us ahead in education, which is why Dewey, Montessori and other great educators insisted on non-standardized, experiential, contextualized learning. Good teaching, learning and evaluating are intricately intertwined and interdependent. Pulling students and teachers out of this is like pulling a carrot out of the ground to see how well it is growing.
Dr. Bartoli,
Krashen intelligently posts ideas, like the letter to the New York Times, brief and fixed on a central point. As you noted, good teaching, learning and evaluating are intricately intertwined and interdependent. One post will never cover it all. His posts generally spawn new posts like this one which further the discussion in new ways with new ideas. As you noted, this is where ed reform and testing will always fall short.
I too wish to thank you for this post. I was also thinking how government officials have used testing on unsuspecting victims. I would add to your list the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in which unsuspecting African men who thought they were receiving free health care were injected with the disease. I believe the Common Core State Standards are much a ruse in the same manner. An unwitting public thinks CCSS are for the good of the nation, when their actual purpose is to privatize education for the good of a corpocracy.
Thank you for this–my thoughts exactly. I have written to Arne Duncan to say, if I wanted to keep the school-to-prison pipeline in place, I could not have come up with a better plan than his.
As educators, we try to do the things our governing bodies (local, state, and federal) tell us to do. We try to do them well. At some point, we have to admit that doing these things is tantamount to malpractice.