Testing will save us

In Tuesday's Christian Science Monitor they're running an editorial letter to the editor arguing that No Child Left Behind and testing generally has been a great thing for American children. It's only left-wing dogma, the author implies, which is preventing us from rejoicing. I thought I'd take a closer look.

According to Thomas Sowell, author of this rant:

Not only have test scores in math and reading shown "solid gains" in the words of The New York Times, young black students have "significantly narrowed the gap" between themselves and white students. All this is based on official annual data from 28,000 schools across the country.

What is especially revealing is that it is the young black students who have made the largest gains while older minority students "scored as far behind whites as in previous decades."

In other words, the children whose education has taken place mostly since the No Child Left Behind Act show the greatest gains, while for those whose education took place mostly under the old system, it was apparently too late to repair the damage.

First of all, he's making a classic mistake of misunderstanding the word "significant" in the context of statistical results. "Significant" just means "not likely to be due to chance." It does not mean "important." I went and looked up the New York Times article, and the test results in question were based on 28,000 students (not schools, as Sowell says, but students). That's a huge sample size, and it pretty much guarantees that any shift in the numbers will be unlikely to be due to random luck, because it takes one heck of a fluke in the data collection to sway 28,000 data points. But is it an important change? A substantial change? A dramatic improvement that proves that standardized testing improves education?

Well, no. Young black students used to be 35 points behind whites on reading tests, on average. Now they're 26 points behind on average. But this is a 9-point improvement on a 500 point scale. The gap shrunk by a quarter, yes, but it's an improvement of 1.8% of the total scale. Furthermore, two of the five years during which this improvement took place were prior to NCLB. As for "solid gains," yes, whites gained 5 points (2.3% better) and blacks gained 14 (7.5% better), but since students have been increasingly instructed on how to take the test, I am not sure one can attribute these small increases to substantial improvements in reading. They could simply have improved at test-taking.

I don't buy it, either, that older kids (13- and 17-year-olds) were so "damaged" by early education that there was no helping them, and therefore we can't expect NCLB to do them any good. That's rather a convenient explanation, isn't it? Write off this current generation of teenagers, concentrate on the younger kids... who coincidentally are the only ones who show improvement post-NCLB. I'm just not willing to write off 13-year-olds as damaged goods.

It goes on:

Take something as basic as what teachers should be doing in the classroom. Should teachers be "conveyors of knowledge who enlighten their students with what they know"? Or should teachers "see themselves as facilitators of learning who enable their students to learn on their own"?

Ninety two percent of the professors of education said that teachers should be "facilitators" rather than engaging in what is today called "directed instruction" - and what used to be called just plain teaching.

The fashionable phrase among educators today is that the teacher should not be "a sage on the stage" but "a guide on the side."

Is the 92 percent vote for the guide over the sage based on any hard evidence, any actual results? No. It has remained the prevailing dogma in schools of education during all the years when test scores stagnated and American children have been repeatedly outperformed in international tests by children from other countries.

Wow, it's news to me that American teachers have been letting kids learn on their own for years and years. When I was in school that was not the case. I remember actually wanting to sit there and read my textbook and being prevented. I remember being chastised for reading ahead. I remember mimeographs, handwriting exercises (is there any proof these work? isn't it just that one's fine motor skills improve with age?), etc. In 7th grade I was made to write the 5-paragraph theme, with 5 sentences per paragraph: introduction of thesis, three supporting sentences, conclusion. And my teacher actually handed out lined worksheets, labeled as to which sentence and which paragraph we were writing. I'd certainly call that directed.

I'd bet that teachers do want to be a "guide on the side," but the institution prevents them. Who has time to simply provide materials and let kids go at it? You'd need time to wait through the initial lack of enthusiasm, the cynicism, the boredom, until finally somebody picked up a book and risked becoming interested. This does not occur in a 50-minute period. You have 50 minutes and someone else has decided what your students must learn in that time frame-- so you have to hop to it, you have to start cramming facts down their throats and backing it up with so much repetitive homework that they'll be able to regurgitate these facts while taking tests. I do not think we have had a fair test of allowing teachers to actually be a guide or a facilitator of child-directed learning. I can't recall anything being self-directed from my school days.

Anyway, the editorial goes on:

American children have been particularly outperformed in math, usually ending up at or near the bottom in international math tests. But this has not made a dent in the US education establishment's dogma about the way to teach math.

What is more important in math, that children "know the right answers to the questions" or that they "struggle with the process" of trying to find the right answers? Among professors of education, 86 percent choose "struggling" over knowing.

This is all part of a larger vision in which children "discover" their own knowledge rather than have teachers pass on to them the knowledge of what others have already discovered. The idea that children will "discover" knowledge that took scholars and geniuses decades, or even generations, to produce is truly a faith which passeth all understanding.

This is just absolutely silly. Allowing a child to learn math at their own pace is hardly equivalent to expecting them to deduce the laws of algebra on their own. That's ridiculous.

He goes on:

What about discipline problems in our schools? Fewer than half of the professors of education considered discipline "absolutely essential" to the educational process. As one professor of education put it, "When you have students engaged and not vessels to receive information, you tend to have fewer discipline problems."

All the evidence points in the opposite direction. But what is mere evidence compared with education dogma?

Well, funnily enough, Dr. Sowell doesn't provide any evidence either. "All evidence points" to massive harm done by lack of discipline, he claims... but, well, I guess he'll cover that in some other editorial.

Again, it seems self-evident that teaching kids how to take a test causes kids to do better on tests. My question is, does that have anything to do with real education, knowledge, or (ultimately) quality of life?

But Dr. Sowell doesn't care about the intangibles. What he wants is what's quantifiable: evidence, he calls it. Numbers is what he means. The numbers are better, the numbers have improved-- we must be on the right track. Never mind that the data are attached to real human beings whose knowledge and intelligence is too individual and complex to be accurately measured by any means.