Jan Carr, an author of children’s books, is a dedicated public school parent. She wrote a post wondering why the powerful elites in our society are so obsessed with testing and data. She wondered why they care so little for developing critical thinking.
Jan wrote: “I’ve been a scrappy public school mom for 12 years and counting, and I’ve watched the increasing encroachment of the data and accountability business, which would have our kids prepping for and taking deadening tests at every turn, and our teachers endlessly graded and derided for test results that are a meaningless distraction from real learning. A rich and full education digs deeper; it’s inextricably entwined with books, literature, writing, and the life of the mind; it develops critical thinking.”
I read her latest post and asked Mike Petrilli of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute to respond to it. I have known Mike for many years, and I hold out hope that someday he too will evolve and renounce the reforms he now champions. I think this will happen when his own children encounter them, as Jan Carr’s did.
I invite readers to comment on this discussion.
This is Mike’s commentary:
Dear Ms. Carr,
I enjoyed reading your post about critical thinking; it sounds like you and your son have been lucky to have had some very talented teachers.
l’ve never met Bill Gates, or Eli Broad, or Michael Bloomberg, or Rupert Murdoch; I can’t speak for what lies in their hearts. But I find it very unlikely that they don’t want children to “think critically” because they want to produce a generation of drones. I know that sort of rhetoric is common on the left (including from the late Howard Zinn) but to believe it you have to also believe that Barack Obama, the late Ted Kennedy, the liberal icon George Miller, and countless other liberal supporters of education reform are also out to unplug our children’s minds. That doesn’t pass the “critical thinking” test.
What motivates these folks, as I understand it, is an earnest belief that in today’s knowledge economy, the only way poor kids are going to have a shot at escaping inter-generational poverty is to gain the knowledge, skills, and character strengths that will prepare them to enter and complete some sort of post-secondary education–the pathway to the middle class. And that while reading and math scores don’t come close to measuring everything that counts, they do measure skills that have been linked to later success in college, the workplace, and life.
I suspect that all of these men would like to see students engaged in more of the kind of critical thinking that you describe, and that’s one reason many support the move to the more rigorous “Common Core” standards for English Language Arts and math. The ELA standards, in particular, are designed to push students toward this sort of complex thinking.
The testing movement has caused a lot of harm, I agree, in terms of narrowing the curriculum and encouraging bad teaching. Moving to better standards and tests is one way to address that. But by throwing out the baby with the bathwater we risk going back to the days when poor and minority kids were held to very low expectations–and their achievement plateaued as a result.
In the last two decades, poor and minority kids have made two grade levels of progress in reading and math, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The hope–and it’s really only a hypothesis at this point–is that those greater math and reading skills will help a generation of kids do much better in college and the real world than they otherwise would have. The question for educators and reformers is: How do we keep the good that’s come from testing and accountability while eliminating the bad?
Mike Petrilli
The Common Core ELA standards have much less emphasis on “critical thinking” than the standards of high performing countries. That’s why they have not been internationally benchmarked.
There’s no mystery about what’s in their hearts, they are completely detached from everyone else. They have more in common with amazingly rich people in other countries that they do with any middle/lower class people in the US. Creating more of them (privatize public schools) and less of everyone else (the rest of the public schools left after privatization) seems desireable to them or an unintended consequence.
Testing and Accountability, if implemented correctly, can often measure standard deviation from a mean of critical thinking ability, but it is a recreation in a vacuum which discounts the 90% of everything else that comes into play when meaningful and diagnostic attributes are applied. Now, is the above comma spliced sentence critical thinking? Maybe. Can a test measure it beyond grammar? No.
I think the fundamental issue is not whether reformers care about students (especially students who live in poverty), but whether they care MORE about profits.
The evidence is clear.
There’s a difference between using standardized tests as an indicator – helping to spot places where there is trouble – and using them as prima facie evidence of a high quality education. But the current “reform” movement does precisely the latter.
I have heard from one of my son’s CPS teachers that Brizard has resigned!!!
Sent from my iPhone
Fred Klonsky was reporting the same, although the CPS spokesman denied it.
Unfortunately, however, it appears to be wishful thinking: http://p.twimg.com/A2nHmfvCMAAwJW_.jpg
Although Brizard is the first actual educator to be CEO of CPS, since before 1995 when Chicago went to mayoral control and the business model under Mayor Daley, he’s a Broad trained superintendent and he garnered a no confidence vote from teachers when he was superintendent in Rochester, NY, so I would not hold my breath for this guy. While the Chicago Board did not give him a great evaluation recently, he has a contract and I don’t see him leaving anytime soon. http://pureparents.org/?tag=broad
Mr Petrelli is correct; we overreach when we start guessing at the intent to Gates and other reformers, and such statements are easy to dismiss. Nevertheless, the effect of the reform program is to create exactly the effect that Ms. Carr describes, whether those consequences are intended or not. I think that we are to willing to give a pass to people, especially rich people who think they know better, because we believe they are well intended.
“. . . they [reading and math scores] do measure skills that have been linked to later success in college, the workplace, and life.”
No, sir they do not measure “skills”. They measure nothing as it is a logical impossibility to measure the inmeasurable. Learning comes under the logical category of a quality of a person. Any attempt to quantify (tests, grades, etc. . .) a quality (learning) can only be rife with error and therefore invalid. No, no measuring there. The basis of the statement is false therefore the conclusion is false.
“How do we keep the good that’s come from testing and accountability while eliminating the bad?”
We can’t as there is no good that can come from a process that is so error filled that any conclusions are as Wilson says “vain and illusory”. Or to put it in a more mundane fashion, “crap in crap out”. The way to eliminate the bad is to completely eliminate educational standards, standardized testing and the sorting and separating of students that grades and grading are.
Who determined that I, a professional teacher, am a “diagnostician” with supposed tools, standards and standardized testing? Throw that out!!
Well, I’ve commented on this issue many times. Just for instance —
The particular Accountability McGuffin of the Month is not important — the Reform Schoolers could invent a Measure Of Critical Knackitude (MOCK) in a jiffy — and it would be as meaningless as all their other measures.
But measuring critical thinking is not what a MOCK is all about. Only a sucker would fall far that. It’s real value to the Reform Schoolers is all the time and energy you suckers would waste arguing about the value MOCK scores while the corporations who control the MOCK take control of what used to be your profession.
But aren’t you “throwing out the baby with the bathwater” when you eliminate artistry in teaching with “teacher proof” curriculum (thanks, Pearson), cut art & music from public schools, and openly seek out untrained, novice teaching corps to replace professional ones???
I can’t even begin to tell you what’s being done at my daughter’s school all in the name of data collection. I started teaching before NCLB when we were looking at best practices. Teachers that are being forced to be data collectors are NOT using best practices. So this isn’t just about critical thinking. It’s about maximizing learning in general. We’re not doing it now that’s for sure. I’m so sad for my daughter and all children in public schools.
In response to the title/question of your post, Professor Ravitch, the answer is HELL NO! Testing and accountability DO NOT promote critical thinking. Infact, it has the OPPOSITE effect. But you already knew that, didn’t you?
If Barack Obama actually thought that testing and “accountability” promoted critical thinking, he would have enrolled his kids in CPS and now DC public schools. Instead he put them in Lab School and Sidwell Friends, neither of which uses testing or “accountability”. There’s a lot of talk about whether Obama is a good guy, just misguided, or powerless, or what. I think his choice of schools for his own kids tells us all we need to know on that score.
“In the last two decades, poor and minority kids have made two grade levels of progress in reading and math, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.”
I’ve seen a lot of bold assertions from advocates of corporate education “reform”, from the typical claim that poverty is inconsequential for school success, to the unusual claim that students from middle and upper income groups are so advantaged they would be successful without teachers, so their teachers deserve no credit for doing a good job.
However, this is a new one for me: Someone who is actually acknowledging student gains on NAEP scores but then attributing them to the latest education “reform” policies.
Well, Mr. Petrilli, we have been seeing steady increases for poor and minority kids in the long term trends that go back to 1978/1980, long before NCLB and the corporate education “reform” movement, so it makes no sense to attribute them to the “reform” efforts you support. Comparison scores can be seen here:
http://www.epi.org/publication/fact-challenged_policy/
I also found that ironic. Scores are going up, so somehow schools are “failing.” My debate students would be all over that type of a poorly-made argument. And they’re high school freshmen!
We don’t need to look into the hearts of Gates, Broad, Bloomberg and Murdoch. We need only look at their actions, which have resulted in increased segregation in the schools, disenfranchisement, perpetual instability and destabilization, scapegoating of teachers, the repaid transformation of the profession into temporary, at-will employment, privatization and profiteering.
Don’t look at what they profess to feel in their hearts: watch what they do.
These are the usual arguments: developing critical thinking skills vs. teaching to the tests. I think it goes deeper than this and we need to question what IS Critical Thinking and how do we teach it. Dan Willingham has an excellent article on why teaching Critical Thinking is so hard on his website and I would encourage everyone who is interested in the actual research anaylsis to look it up. The take-away from his article is that Critical Thinking is not a skill, (however you can teach meta-cognitive strategies that will make thinking critically more likely), and that it relies on domain knowledge and practice. I think this will put the arguments into a better perspective as we analyze what we are trying to accomplish with education and what is the most effective way to get there.
I agree. You cant teach critical thinking directly. But you can engage students in activities that require critical thinking. Standardized tests do not.
What’s missing is the discussion of charter schools. How can we justify turning our public schools over to profiteers disguised as reformers? Is this democracy or are we heading toward an oligarchy?
We are well on the way, see Paul Krugman’s work for a keener insight to this.
“And that while reading and math scores don’t come close to measuring everything that counts, they do measure skills that have been linked to later success in college, the workplace, and life.”
Correlation is not causation, as Mr. Petrilli should well know. He might as well argue that good penmanship is related to those same later successes, as is being white and being raised in a high-income home. In fact, Mr. Petrilli has reversed the direction of causality, arguing backwards from life success among those who achieve it that they share the common causative trait of good reading and math scores. No sane person would argue that those are not valuable skills, but they are far, far from being the sole causative factors of future success that our education system is now being geared to promote. What about passion, self-motivation, confidence in risk-taking, perseverance, inquisitiveness, creativity, family support, role models, self-discipline, ability to sacrifice and delay gratification, depth of understanding? Oh, and yes, critical thinking?
American engineers and forward thinkers built the railroads and the Panama Canal. Thomas Edison came up with many inventions. This can’t happen anymore with the way Amercian education is gong. Edison would be classified today and told to just complete the test. He would be robbed of any imagination.
Diane, thanks for sending out my blog post. It’s interesting for me to read Mr. Petrilli’s response as well as the other responses posted. While it is certainly true that I cannot discern with certainty the motivations of the men I mentioned, I have to wonder about those motivations because their actions are so destructive. The endless testing is a scourge in so many ways. Here are some anecdotal accounts of experiences I have had:
• THE TESTS ARE FALLIBLE. Often, throughout my son’s public school career, he’s come home with practice tests in which he doesn’t understand why a question required a certain answer. Because I’m a professional writer and editor, I take a look to try to help figure out where he went wrong. Often, I find that I, TOO, would have chosen the “wrong” answer! And when I ask my son why he chose it, he has a very strong and articulate and defensible argument. So we’re “right,” the test is “wrong?” And I am put in the surreal position of having to teach my son how to suss out the right “wrong” answer so he will get a better score on the test!
• KIDS FEEL THAT THEY’RE DEFINED BY A MEANINGLESS NUMBER. Once, during the first week of school, I was standing outside my son’s school for pick up. That day, the kids had gotten scores for tests they had taken the previous spring. While I waited for my son to emerge, this is what I heard from the other kids: “I’m a 3.” “I’m a 2.” “I’m a 4.” In other words, DURING THE FIRST WEEK OF SCHOOL, WHEN THEY SHOULD BE EXCITED ABOUT THE CLASSES AND LEARNING THEY WOULD EXPERIENCE IN THE COMING YEAR, they were deadened by thinking that they were reduced to a number. Truly, it broke my heart. These were high stakes test scores that would determine which high schools they would eligible for. What a way to start the year!
• THE TESTS ARE DEADENING. Many teachers have told me that on test days, the kids have a flattened affect. I’ve definitely seen that in my son. His interest in learning flattens out the more tests that are piled on. He is an excellent student and has a curious intellect, but there’s only so much one can take.
• TEACHERS HAVE TO RESTRICT DISCUSSION IN ORDER TO GET THROUGH THE REQUIRED MATERIAL. My son has often reported that teachers had to cut off discussion in order to move on so that they could cover everything that was going to be on a test. As a teacher, does one want to dig in deeply, or cover a lot of surface ground? Does one want to encourage kids to think and discuss and provide supports for their answers, or does one want to teach kids to spit out a pat answer? I’m sure that teachers in the private schools attended by the kids of the men I cited are encouraged to have a deep and meaningful curriculum.
In my experience as a former teacher, I think the real key to keeping up the quality of the classroom is in the teachers.
• Provide the teachers with lots of staff development, so they, too, are constantly thinking and exploring and creating.
• Recruit smart, good teachers who will stick with the profession and pay them well so they stay. And of course the union is key to this.
• Have experienced teachers mentoring new teachers, which helps both, keeping the older teachers fresh as well as providing support for the newer teachers.
• And keep class size LOW so teachers can actually track and interact meaningfully with individual students. If a writing teacher is responsible for hundreds of students, how is s/he supposed to give meaningful feedback on papers?
All of these supports for teachers and the classroom are ones that that stem from educators themselves, not the business community. Whatever the motivation, an emphasis on data and accountability and testing is wrong-headed, completely missing the point.
I might add to what I wrote above. Some might easily dismiss my anecdotal observations since they are not data, not statistically significant, but I would point out that observation is one of the key assessment tools used by teachers in the classroom. Skilled teachers assess all the time – noting a child’s comment or an element of his/her work that indicates he/she now understands something – or doesn’t. And teachers constantly alter what they’re doing, how they’re presenting something, based on the information they glean.
Of course, for teachers to be able to be alert observers, they can’t be consumed with testing and test prep. And class size has to be small. It’s always interesting to me when I do author’s visits at private schools. On one typical visit, the kids dispersed from my presentation to work on their own writing pieces. There were 12 kids in the class and 3 teachers, who met with kids individually to go over the pieces and conference about them. With those numbers, each adult was only responsible for 4 kids! Contrast this to the usual public school numbers: 1 teacher/28 kids. With higher numbers, teachers spend so much time simply doing classroom management.
Business interests focus narrowly on data. But with all their test scores, and draining funds that might keep class size down, their numbers don’t add up.
I wonder if Mike Petrilli also claims to not know the motivations of ALEC, when he was a scheduled speaker at the ALEC Education Task Force Meeting, in Washington, DC in December, 2010, presenting on the topic of “Education Reform After the Election”. ALEC includes sample drafts of “model” legislation in their “35 Day Mailings”, so it would be rather difficult to not know their agenda. You can see the task force materials listed under Education at Common Cause: http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=807245
We were given a very clear picture this year from the TX Republican Platform that conservatives do, in fact, want to ban critical thinking and higher order thinking skills in schools, among other things valued by progressive educators: http://s3.amazonaws.com/texasgop_pre/assets/original/2012Platform_Final.pdf
Regarding the obsession over testing and the use of test scores for making major life decisions, why no one of stature involved in the “reform” movement remembers Campell’s Law is beyond me:
“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” Donald Campbell