Education

I'm an educator. I didn't set out to be one. I wanted to be, at various ages, a musician, a researcher, a spy, an actor, a writer -- pretty much anything but an educator. I hated school, I hated teachers, and I despised the one-way thinking of American establishment education.

Somehow I ended up as an educator, partly out of economic necessity (what else does someone with two degrees in the liberal arts become?) and partly because I naively thought I could make things better. For the past 20+ years, I have written curriculum, tutored immigrants, taught Shakespeare to inner city kids, directed literacy programs from K-12, and coached college students who want to teach.

I've seen education from a lot of angles, and I've come to a one-sentence conclusion about it all: American education has confused formative assessment and summative assessment.

Formative assessment is what you look at along the journey to a learning goal. We're talking about getting a quick snapshot, a quantum of interim data that helps you adjust your curriculum or pedagogy on the fly. As a rule, it should be data-driven and specific. It should be binary; it should ask, are students getting it? Can my civics students name the three branches of government, yes or no? If not, I'd better reteach it -- probably in a different way, since formative data is most useful and accurate in reflecting the effectiveness of my teaching.

Summative assessment is, for lack of a better term, the final exam. We're now at the point of not being able to reteach. The course/semester/year is over. How did I do in getting my students from point a to point b? It seems to me that this data necessarily needs to be more flexible, more nuanced, more qualitative.

Again, I might want to know if my students can name the three branches of government -- but while I might ask them to take a quiz for formative assessment (i.e., name them), for the summative assessment I might ask them to write a song about them, make a poster about them, or stage a quick scene showing how they interact. Whether my students can name the three branches doesn't reflect my actual goal -- which might be to have students be able to work with that knowledge. (Getting them to name the branches is simply a heuristic to use along the way.)

Naturally, we tend to use the most inflexible method -- high-stakes multiple choice testing -- for summative assessment. And we use the more flexible and qualitative methods -- such as multi-intelligence portfolios and even intuiting from conversation -- for formative assessment.

This is backward and bizarre. What's more, you can take almost any contemporary problem in education -- teaching to the test, drugging "attention deficit" kids, excessive use of removal or suspension as a disciplinary tool, dismissing the arts almost entirely from the school day -- and trace it directly back to this single source.

And as far as tracing things back to a single source, the trend itself can be traced to the creation of the U.S. Department of Education. Once the federal government got involved, standardization was inevitable. Don't get me wrong. Standards are one thing. We should have some high expectations for educational outcomes. Standardization is another thing entirely. Standardization tends to happen at the lowest common denominator.

McDonalds meals are standardized, for example -- and there's very little love and pride that goes into the day-to-day creation of Big Macs in franchises across the country. That doesn't mean that the original idea of the Big Mac wasn't inspired. Think of it in conceptual form: a double burger with melted cheese, crisp lettuce, some pickles and onions for zip, and a tangy sauce to seal the deal. Sounds great! Put it on the menu of any bistro in the country. But in execution, it falls a little short of the concept, yes? By standardizing education, we made the same trade off.

The difference is that making a Big Mac without love or pride doesn't damage its self-esteem, blunt its creativity, or drive it to a state of grinding ennui. It's just a sandwich. But students, it's been said often before, are not widgets -- or mass-produced burgers. We can't stamp them out in a factory-style school, pour the right knowledge in their heads, and send the regional manager around twice a year to count the educational equivalent of the average number of sesame seeds on the buns.

The even more extraordinary element of the problem is that every superintendent in the nation would react with horror at the suggestion that we ought to McDonalds-ize the education of our children. I suspect that everyone at the Department of Education would nod at what I've written here. Every educator in the country would agree with that paragraph directly above.

The dogs bark, but the caravan rolls on.