A Message from Education Action: Toronto
December 22, 2010
Upcoming ARCs, Standardized Tests: The Wrong Way To Measure Achievement, The Progressive Side of "Waiting For Superman."
Dear Friends,
Upcoming ARCS
ARC (Accommodation Review Committee) season is upon us again. Janet Bojti, from the Campaign For Public Education, follows up Diane Dyson's article on the "double jeopardy" of ARCs in poor neighbourhoods with a short update (below) on the latest two ARCS that are now going forward at the TDSB. So far, the ARC process has not been a happy one for most of the communities it has touched, closing needed neighbourhood schools, but recently there is news that things might be changing. A number of trustees on the TDSB, responding to their communities on this issue, seem determined to craft a more democratic and transparent ARC process. This work will go on at the Planning and Priorities Committee beginning in January and will precede the implementation of the two upcoming ARCs in Wards 1 and 14. For those who have been engaged in the ARC process or may be facing it in the near future, you should listen in on the discussion at Planning and Priorities and get involved in it.
Click HERE to download: Janet Bojti, "Two New ARCs"
Standardized Tests: The Wrong Way To Measure Achievement
At the core of the coming discussion at the TDSB on the "Achievement Gap" is our understanding of the role of standardized tests.
At present, the Board defines "achievement" or school "success" almost entirely in terms of test score results. It's an approach we think is completely wrong-headed. And we don't think we are alone in this. From many thoughtful perspectives - whether from crusty tories, free-thinking liberals or died-in-the-wool socialists, working-class or middle-class - this is understood as the wrong way to judge achievement. What really matters is what you can do in the world, including reading, writing and math. The tests don't test this. Instead, they test fragmented bits of knowledge, disconnected from students' experience and understanding and detached from any meaningful action in the world. They test - really police - a deeply alienating curriculum (reflected in Ontario's "Expectations" curriculum - a form of Outcomes Based Education) that our government and corporations have concluded is the best way to produce what they call "human capital," especially the kind of "human capital" that takes low-level jobs and doesn't make a fuss about it.
The linking of "quality" with test score results, however, has become one of those "big lies" that get more and more public credence the more they're told. But, like most "big lies," once you start to examine them, you see - even at first glance - how empty it they are. In this case, what you discover with the "quality" agenda turns out to be nothing more than what might be described as "academic junk food" - offering a thick frosting of "quality" rhetoric on top, with nothing of substance underneath.
The press is deeply culpable in promoting this "big lie." Look for example at the recent coverage of the latest PISA scores in Canada's national paper. PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) is the OECD's global test and is administered every three years to half a million students from 65 countries. Canada's students, it appears, are slipping, especially in comparison to Asian youngsters. In an article entitled "Canada is becoming outclassed" (Globe and Mail, Dec. 8, 10), Kate Hammer writes that "Canada posted a 10-point decline in reading scores, while Korea managed a 15 point gain. Shanghai in China, Korea, Finland, Hong Kong and Singapore have all surpassed Canada in reading." Her assumption throughout a two-page spread is that these tests measure education quality and that Canada's place in the world is under assault. She quotes, with approval, Paul Cappon, president of the Canadian Council on Learning, who says "the other countries that are moving ahead, they're working with a national framework and national goals. Canada needs to have for every grade level in every discipline a standard that is common across the country." The next day in the Globe, Margaret Wente warns us not to worry too much about our lower scores (Finland has slipped, too) while assuring us that this test "despite some flaws, is universally regarded as authoritative." A day later in the same paper, Jeffrey Simpson argues that the PISA scores are "a good measuring stick for an element in society that, more than most, will determine a country's future well-being and competitiveness." Just like Hammer, there is not word from Wente or Simpson defending the link between higher test scores and higher quality. There is good reason for this. It can't be done, and nobody tries.
In a related article a week so earlier (Globe and Mail, Nov. 27, 10) you can see the same kind of presentation, as Kate Hammer weights in again on the issue. This time she is reporting on the consulting firm McKinsey and Co.'s recent report entitled "How the World's Most Improved School Systems Keep Getting Better," which looked at 20 school systems from across the globe, and has a foreword by Michael Fullan, the premier's senior education advisor. In the report, Ontario is centred out as a "top performer with a history of sustained improvement" in its test scores. This was before the most recent PISA slippage, but its supportive emphasis on test score production in the province is revealing. The report cites Ontario "for announcing ambitious achievement targets, testing regularly and then promoting discussion on how to improve scores." One initiative mentioned in the report is "the Ministry of Education's Parent Reaching Out fund, which provides grants to school councils or parent groups with ideas for ways to improve parent engagement in student achievement [i.e. raising scores]. Since the program was introduced in 2006, the province has provided more than $12 million towards more than 7,000 grants." Again, for all the public relations involved in such an outreach, we don't hear a word from McKinsey, Fullan or Hammer on the quality of learning being measured here. And we won't.
Again, the reason we won't is that these tests aren't about quality - aren't about children genuinely exploring and grappling with the world alongside their teachers - but are rather about policing a curriculum that has nothing to do with quality. Our Ministry of Education is centrally about human capital production - and has been from the beginnings of industrial capitalism in Ontario in the 19th century - whatever its rhetoric at any particular time (progressive or "back to basics").
Over the years, this curriculum thrust has, of course, been widely resisted by most of the people who work in our schools, and, as a result, we don't have children lining up to practice the company song for a job slot in a future corporate workforce. In response to this resistance, the folks who have run our school system - and at no time more than the present - have had to be largely content with the fragmentation of children's minds, the dissolution of alternatives to the present social and economic order, especially among working-class children. That's what Ontario's curriculum "expectations" do: fragment children's minds, undercut their solidarity with those around them and with the natural world, undermine their sense that there is a human story to be told and that they are part of it. Insisting that such a curriculum be taught is what the standardized tests do, in addition to earning large profits for the firms that produce them. The tests are of no importance in themselves. High or low, the scores don't matter. Alberta likes them high. Ontario has liked them low in the not-too-distant past (as an ongoing critique of public education), but now higher is better among the McGuinty Liberals. The official emphasis on "raising the bar" and "closing the gap" on the test score front simply distracts us from the "human capital" curriculum the testing supports.
If the current Liberal government can raise the numbers of those who pass the test to 75% in the time it has allocated that will be useful for them in persuading the public they are doing something in education. But, if they fail, it doesn't matter in terms of the more fundamental "human capital" aim of the curriculum. The most important thing that matters is that there is a system of standardized tests in place to force teachers to teach to the test - really the form of the test, which is itself a template for learning one-dimensional "expectations" or "outcomes" determined by the Ministry.
Because of this curriculum emphasis, the quality of the tests themselves doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how badly they are constructed or how banal or even wrong their content turns out to be. It doesn't matter how shoddy the marking procedures are. It doesn't matter that most teachers don't consider them a valid reflection of what their students know. What counts is that they are there to insure that students and teachers learn to take disconnected orders from above, and, in the process, they provide, perhaps, the most explicit form of regurgitation of student learning. It is in this sense that standardized tests "lead" the system -- in the explicitness of the regurgitation required and by providing a public measurement of school "success" against which students, teachers and principals are judged. What's important happens prior to the tests. The tests themselves are rough-hewn guardians of this process.
To give us some idea of just how little governments like that of Ontario care about the actual quality of standardized tests, here is an extraordinary article by Dan Dimaggio (below) chronicling the marking of these tests. He concludes: "Why would people in their right minds want to leave educational assessment in the hands of poorly trained, overworked, low-paid temps, working for companies interested only in cranking out acceptable numbers and improving their bottom line? Though the odds might seem slim, our collective goal, as students, teachers, parents - and even test scorers - should be to liberate education from this farcical numbers game." The article is entitled "The loneliness of the long-distance test scorer" and is found in the December 2010 issue of Monthly Review. We encourage you to visit the Monthly Review website, www.monthlyreview.org, and, if you can afford it, buy a subscription. There is no better magazine to help us make the link between politics and economics in this age of globalizing capitalism.
Click HERE to download: Dan Dimaggio,
"The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Test Scorer"
The good news on the testing and curriculum front is that Ontario's Elementary Teachers Federation appears more ready to take on the fragmentation and narrowing of their students' knowledge and the testing that encourages it. In a recent position paper, "Building Better Schools: an education agenda for the 2011 provincial election" (below), ETFO takes a clear stand against the province's test score focus to insist that its members fulfil their "responsibility ... to foster creativity, innovation, a love of learning, and a commitment to full participation in our democratic society." The federation puts forward a program it argues its "members believe would have the most significant impact on improving the quality of programs..." It's a serious document, worth your reading; it's real "quality" they're talking about, even if they have yet to dismiss the value of such things as "random sampling." Key recommendations include: "Reduce the number of prescribed student outcomes and identify instead a set of core learning goals. Provide all elementary classrooms with resources that support hands-on, experiential learning." While this language is still within a top-down "outcomes based" framework - rather than encouraging broad-based curriculum areas for teachers to teach - it can be read progressively if the learning goals are broad enough. It is clearly an important step in the right direction. The paper is also good on reducing class size in Grades 4-8 and in the new early learning kindergarten program, on strengthening English-as-a-Second Language programs, on "resources that reflect the rich cultural, racial and gender identities of students and their families," on insisting on directing more resources to poor schools, and on supporting more integration of children's services, particularly the use of schools as "community hubs."
Click HERE to download: ETFO, "Building Better Schools
the Screws on Local Trustees"
The Progressive Side of "Waiting For Superman."
"Waiting for Superman" has been much in the news these days. We think Doug Little's take on the film (see www.thelittleeducationreport.com) has much to recommend it. It helps open up the film for really engaged discussion.
Click HERE to download: Doug Little on "Waiting for Superman"
We hope you all have a great holiday and a happy new year.
In solidarity,
George Martell and Faduma Mohamed
Co-Chairs Education Action: Toronto
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