An article in the Wall Street Journal goes on a rant against critics of standardized testing. It was written by a charter school advocate in Texas and a professor at ultra-conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan. The authors are shocked that so many parents and local school boards in Texas want to reduce the number of tests needed to graduate high from 15 to only three or four.
They insist that American students are really incredibly stupid and the best way to make sure they gain the wisdom of the ages is to demand more of Pearson’s multiple choice tests.
You can see that they really care about the Higher Things because they drop names like Homer, Milton, Melville, and Shakespeare. They also drop some references to the Founding Fathers.
Two things are odd about this article (in addition to the fact that the statistics they cite were based on a telephone survey of 1,200 students, who were asked multiple-choice questions and had no reason to take the survey seriously).*
First, when American students were classically educated, many eons ago, as the authors yearn for, they were not taking any standardized tests. None. Zero. Zip. They were writing essays and examined orally by their teachers. It seems the authors yearn for the good old days of 1910, when the high school graduation rate was about 10%.
And then there is the irony that the authors are the sort who usually rant about the importance of respecting parental choice. Why do they deny the choice that so many Texas parents so clearly and passionately want: an education where more time and resources are devoted to teaching, not testing?
Gosh, with more time for teaching and learning, the students would actually have time to read Homer, Shakespeare, Melville, and Milton, instead of test prep.
*Full disclosure: I was co-chair of the organization that commissioned the survey and co-authored the introduction. The organization, named Common Core, has no connection to the Common Core State Standards. It was created to advocate for the liberal arts and sciences, not for testing them. I resigned from it in 2009.
P.S. a comment below points out that Hillsdale College attracts many home-schoolers who do not take batteries of standardized tests annually.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s worth noting that while Hillsdale does offer a major in education, they have not been allowed to offer state teaching certification since 2011.
I wonder how much connection there might be to the 1999 scandal at Hillsdale involving its long-term president and his sexual improprieties with his daughter-in-law that led to her suicide. http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/220720/horror-hillsdale/john-j-miller
That was one of the most horrifying hypocrisies this country has ever seen. An utter disgrace. There is a new president now, but the taint to conservative protestations remains. I do not see that conservative principles themselves are compromised by one of their most prominent spokesmen back then having been found so personally lacking in integrity and self-control. Having an affair with one’s son’s wife really is beyond the pale of acceptability, but if he hadn’t been conservative, liberals would have excused it in one of their own. As for instance, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. After all, it’s just sex, right Paul?
Hi Diane,
When I talk to folks who aren’t involved in education (but they read newspapers that say we educators all stink), they’re surprised to hear when I tell them about you and your change from supporting NCLB to not being a supporter. I know you write about this in your book if I remember correctly, but do you have a blog post that I can reference? If not, could you consider writing one?
At least for my friends who can critically think and see two viewpoints, it’s intriguing to them to find that someone has changed their mind so drastically when it comes to NCLB, high stakes testing, etc…(If I remember correctly, you supported NCLB years ago, no?)
They also find someone like Gary Rubinstein interesting, as he supported TFA for close to 20 years, and now is critically re-evaluating TFA and its role. People seem to be receptive to hearing about people like this, rather than listening to Rhee or unions.
If you look on my website, you will find many short articles–op-eds–that I wrote explaining why I changed my views, and why the “reform” ideas are failing. We are a pragmatic nation. We usually don’t continue to do the same things over and over when they fail repeatedly.
My website is dianeravitch.com
Thanks for responding! I know you’re super busy!
I am the first to agree that our students do not know things they should. I am totally opposed to the idea that reducing the number of tests will “water down” graduation standards. Less tests, less drinking of the STEM Kool-Aid and more reliance on teachers to do their jobs is the answer. In my high school math classes, I teach geography, grammar, ethics, history, political science, government, economics, chemistry, physics, biology, philosophy, music, art appreciation, government and a touch of revolution. Why? They are being taught to answer questions about some of these topics, but not a fundamental understanding of how they work. Too many teachers have been herded (baaaahh) into the test-based curriculum so their administrative and political ‘betters’ can profit from increased test-taking ability.
We need thinkers, not test-takers.
As I am preaching to the choir on this forum, I shall now pack up the van with petition forms, flyers, my campaign banner, “Parent-Trigger Kills Public Schools” buttons, and head to the local library. I will be collecting petition signatures for my 2014 School Board run. We need to ALL step up to the plate and do what we can to stop the madness.
Now there’s an honest man. He is getting out an addressing the public and running for office. But, I don’t know what you’ll say when someone in the audience asks you about teaching “a touch of revolution” in your math class. I agree, however, that if one is polymath enough to be able to do it, one should. I guess that means I can begin preaching constitutionalism in MY math classes. Sauce for goose, you know.
Polymath – probably not. But I try to teach a love of learning for whatever crosses your path. I want kids to know there is more to appreciate about learning than what their school experience is showing them.
And Harlan, I am always pulling out my pocket Constitution!
Of great irony with respect to the Hillsdale professor is the fact that Hillsdale is known nationally as a haven for homeschoolers. Though they request a transcript from a homeschooling guild and a couple of letters of recommendation, they don’t seem to expect any testing data prior to college admission.
Isn’t that a positive, then?
It’s NOT a positive when they demand that the public schools continue testing while the majority of its students were homeschooled and thus not subjected to the same practices.
I grew up in the 60s and 70s and I just can’t imagine how we all got educated without NCLB and all those unabashedly creative independent minded teachers.
TAKE TWO: I grew up in the 60s and 70s and I just can’t imagine how we all got educated without NCLB and WITH all those unabashedly creative independent minded teachers.
An interesting reply to this :
online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324077704578358792176230384.html
Sounds like some people are thinking in Texas. I especially like the comment “To make a cow gain weight, you don’t just keep weighing it—you need to feed it.”
Thanks for the link, Tim. You’re right about that bit of Texas wisdom:
There is a paywall. 😦
I will post the article right here.
Doing a Texas Two-Step Around Education Reform
Watering down new high-school graduation standards will shortchange students, employers and the country.
By CHARLES COOK AND TERRENCE MOORE
For decades, policy makers have gone back and forth adopting the latest fads in school reform without any measurable improvement in learning. The latest trend in Texas is to de-emphasize the liberal arts and increase instructional time spent in math, science and technology.
As the Texas legislature convened last month, a coalition of anti-testing organizations, including Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment, promoted a plan to gut the state’s tough new high-school graduation standards. Instead of passing 15 end-of-course exams, a student would graduate by passing two or three. More than 800 Texas school boards have adopted a resolution to water down requirements.
We disagree. States across the country are increasing graduation standards, and Texas cannot afford to water down its own. A proposal to eliminate exams in world geography and world history as a graduation requirement, for instance, is shortsighted. Ever-lower expectations lead to one predictable outcome: a profound ignorance of the world among young people in an era when international events and evolving fiscal and trade policies have a personal impact on communities, businesses and individuals in every corner of the U.S.
Who hasn’t heard or seen the signs of this ignorance? To cite one of many now-familiar results, there is the 2008 report “Still at Risk: What Students Don’t Know, Even Now” by Frederick Hess. It found that nearly 25% of 17-year-olds surveyed nationwide could not identify Adolf Hitler. More than 25% believed Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World after 1750. Forty percent could not place World War I as occurring between 1900 and 1950. Nearly 40% could not identify the Renaissance as the period in European history noted for cultural and technological advances.
Allowing young people to graduate as historical or geographical illiterates is myopic for another reason. Training them for getting jobs is not good enough; graduates of public schools are also citizens. Ask any physician today whether politics affects his livelihood.
We have a different approach to equipping students to face the future, one that has the weight of millennia of human experience behind it: a rigorous classical education. Such an education (called liberal-arts at the college level) does not shortchange math and science. On the contrary, those subjects are studied with more rigor than can be seen in today’s public schools.
Students also learn the fundamentals of English grammar; American and world history through the reading of primary source documents; and the great stories of human struggle and yearning told by the greatest storytellers—Homer, Shakespeare, Milton and Melville.
They study the principles of liberty and self-government as articulated by the Founding Fathers and the ennobling beauties found in painting, sculpture and song. Yes, the children have to learn Latin, too, just as the Founding Fathers did, because that language gives the greatest insight into the vocabulary and grammar of our own tongue and the Romance languages, including Spanish.
Certainly America needs as many engineers and computer scientists as the country requires in the 21st century. But that does not describe what lies ahead for the vast majority of young people entering the marketplace. The most common complaints of American employers is that job applicant and recent hires lack communication skills and higher-level thinking skills. More plainly, many applicants cannot read a memo, they cannot express themselves in speech or in writing, they lack the ability to think through difficult problems.
We think that students who have been taught to write forcefully by studying Shakespeare and Tom Paine, who have learned to speak by studying the speeches of Cicero and Abraham Lincoln, who have learned to think through difficult problems by studying the Constitution through an analysis of the Federalist Papers, and who revel in the rigors of Latin grammar will have no difficulty in reading the boss’s memo.
Training young people in the liberal arts and sciences also will better prepare them to become “the boss” when it is time for the present cohort of bosses to retire. Those on the front lines of hiring employees in this state see the need for a classical education. Now parents are increasingly demanding such an education for their children. We know this in part because the number of schools that have come to Hillsdale College each spring in search of graduating seniors to recruit as teachers of classical subjects has more than doubled in the past five years.
Before long, we will begin to see how well the approach works. Responsive Education Solutions (ResponsiveEd), the largest charter-school system in Texas, in collaboration with Hillsdale College, is providing students the opportunity to receive a rigorous classical education tuition-free. Founders Classical Academy is a public charter school that opened near Dallas in August 2012. The response has been almost overwhelming. The school initially started with 450 students and will educate more than 700 next year.
Classical-curriculum schools in other states, such as Ridgeview Classical Schools in Colorado, generally have waiting lists of over a thousand applicants. The graduates of such programs go on to college to study the liberal arts and sciences. Typically, the biggest complaint of these graduates is that their freshman courses were too easy.
As ResponsiveEd and Hillsdale College continue to open classical schools across the country, we want to see other schools, including noncharter public schools, brought up to a serious level of accountability as well.
Jobs do not create the human mind; the human mind creates jobs. As a result, the very best education—the kind the Founding Fathers had—is what will produce good workers and good citizens. The challenge for those who want to eliminate testing in world history and geography or other subjects in Texas is to explain how students are prepared for a global economy when they are not required to learn anything about either the globe or the economy.
Mr. Cook is CEO of ResponsiveEd, a charter-school district with over 60 schools in Texas. Mr. Moore is a Hillsdale College professor of history who advises the college’s Barney Charter School Initiative.
A version of this article appeared March 9, 2013, on page A11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Doing a Texas Two-Step Around Education Reform.
Thank you!
Wow. After reading that, I agree that it is indeed a strange article. Do they not understand that American’s focus on reading and math test scores over the past 12 years has resulted in less time for the subjects they desire us to understand the most?
They mistake test passing for “getting an education.” They mistake “more tests” for “better education.”
More tests is not more rigor. More tests is not more information, nor more education. More does not equal better, necessarily. Cook and Moore fail to do the math and note, as everyone who does the math notes, that it all just doesn’t add up.
You could know this from watching Sesame Street, which I’ll wager they also don’t like.
Hillsdale has never been strong in mathematics, nor rhetoric.
Diane, you use this rather idealistic piece in the Wall Street Journal as an excuse to deliver your own series of rants against your pet peeves rather than evaluate the intrinsic value of the comprehensive high school liberal arts curriculum they are advocating. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all high school students had such an education? They hope to introduce it into public schools as well as the charters they currently advise. A better response would have been to praise the curriculum and to advocate for the public funds needed to bring it into the public schools of Texas and of other states. I wonder whether the fact that Hillsdale college is most known for not accepting any government funding of any sort, even for student scholarships, is what really galls your statist heart. It is also less well known for also for requiring that all students take a course in the constitution. Ah, but, you probably think the constitution is outdated and should be skirted, avoided, or manipulated to give the federal government more and more control of citizens’ lives. But if school children all over the country were to learn what the constitution is really for, to protect them from intrusion of government into their lives, whooops, there would go the progressive (so called) program of larger and larger government staffed by bureaucrats. If you like the Veterans Administration’s approach to handling the health and claims of veterans, then support Diane’s program for education, because that’s what you’ll get. If not, perhaps like Hillsdale and the Texas charter chain of which one of the authors is CEO, you should give responsible private education a chance to restore a new spirit of constitutional government to the country. I used to think progressives liked to look to the future of the country, but the education progressives like Diane, are really backward looking, and like to argue sideways by bringing up essential irrelevancies. Good show, Diane. You are now my official poster girl for what’s wrong with education advocacy in this country. You were my hero when you were advocating a national Shakespeare requirement. Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Melville are still a criterion of excellence and wisdom, which at least you have not abandoned.
Harlan, what they advocate–a liberal arts curriculum–is something I have advocated for all my life. But they make the mistake of thinking that the way to make it happen is to add more and more standardized tests. The tests kill the curriculum, which makes this article ridiculous.
Harlan,
I believe every reader of this blog would love to have and provide the kind of education this article describes. However, our point is that the overemphasis on testing prevents such a thing from happening.
For example, do you know that social studies in many places is now treated as another reading class with history and geography as the content? How about the fact that science is put on the back burner for a while in some elementary schools because there is no test on it until fifth grade? We have to make sure the third graders pass third grade before we worry about their fifth grade science scores. Let’s not even talk about what is happening to art, music and physical education.
I’m sure the “reform through tests” people didn’t intend for all of this to happen, but it did.
Your continued assertion that Diane or anyone does not believe in teaching the constitution or assuming what they believe about it truly waters down all of your arguments and just makes you sound condescending. We get it… You don’t think the constitution is taught. As a parent of a 7th grader and 10th grader, I can assure you they both have had or are currently taking civics and have studied the constitution. What is clear that neither party follows it with respect to education and representing the public good.
The test prep my children endured, day in and day out, hours of test prep homework each night, and even pulling one of the out of lunch and recess, was a terrible waste. And it makes them think less of their abilities.
I was a fan of Hillsdale, until they stood behind charter schools. They will not take FASFA money for their own students, but form charter schools using government funds. If they want to start their own schools, let them, without the tax payers money. I don’t think they would get to far.
I was educated in Texas before the advent of testing (Class of ’84! Woot!) I had mostly wonderful teachers that I am eternally grateful for-Gooslby who introduced me to Shakepeare, Apple who hammered composition and rhetoric into me, Collins who had a set of point-counterpoint books in class on a myriad of historical issues, Barber who got me excited about Biology, Whitaker who made AV and debate a hoot, and on and on.
Sure there a very few that were not to my teenage liking, but none were Rephormy edu-zombie bad. I had friends that took drafting classes while others took journalism, shop or home economics or child care. One hall smelled of solvents, another cookies, another ink from the school press. Not bad for a small school in a small town just outside of Houston.
I went to UT and U of H. I kicked around a bit and eventually began teaching in Houston, then overseas in private American curriculum international schools and then back to Houston. The second time around the beast of NCLB & TAKS had grown beyond all recognition and was damaging to kids. In both public school tours, so much of what I had enjoyed as a student was gone. The shop rooms were converted to test tutoring centers. The band instruments were locked away as music was out. The school paper was gone as the math classes needed room for double blocking.
By the second time around in Texas I had kids of my own and after the private school experience, they did not like the new class and its focus. One daughter during in-class breakfast everyday was shown test prep videos instead of using the time as a social community building time.
Luckily there still are good public school programs in Houston and both daughters have found amazing schools with enlightened leadership. Those schools are the exception though and not the rule. If not for those, we would have headed back overseas to get that rich experience I had and they deserve.