I was invited by the New York Times to write a 300-word article on the subject of testing joy and grit. I wrote this. The headline says, “Teach Resilience, Don’t Test It,” but that was not the point of my comment. I maintained that teachers have always taught the traits we now call “grit,” but it is not a “separate subject.” It is taught and learned at home and in school.
I wrote that the idea of testing grit was silly, nutty, mad.
I assumed the Times would have a hard time finding anyone to defend the prospect of testing joy and grit. I was wrong. They did. It was a debate, after all.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
If they go nuts with it, and they will, parents will object.
Obviously people have different ideas about what constitutes “character” and “success” and my child shouldn’t be measured on whatever character traits are valued by 150 highly-placed ed reformers nor do I have to accept whatever reductive scale they’re using as definitive on “character”.
If they thought they had trouble with opt outs before, they ain’t seen nothing yet.
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I have found, in teaching graduate and undergraduate students since 1999, and writing about learning approaches and education policy for the past five years, that if you properly motivate students, they will demonstrate a remarkable intensity and resilience in approaching subjects and in the self-learning that occurs when they get to select their own projects (i.e. student-based learning plus project-based learning).
This, of course, is the antithesis of the homogenized, one-size-fits all, soul-crushing (for students and teachers) thesis of Common Core and all its variants. If there’s any place for creativity, innovation, and critical thinking it should be in “school,” in whatever its form, from birth to higher ed,
Teachers teach because they love teaching and enjoy promoting student learning. How ’bout we get back to that as a nation, and get the billionaires and bureaucrats out of the business of ruining public education, before they make it small enough to drown in a bathtub..
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This!
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Ah, I love your articulation of the larger, ALEC-led goal (the one so carefully hidden inside the neo-liberal game of “benevolent” public education reformation invasions): To shrink public education down so small, to make it so insignificant, that one day it might simply be remembered as how we did education “in the olden days.”
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I just don’t understand the defenders of testing this type of thing. Who are these people? What do they have to gain?
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What a set up this is! Let’s remember that anything that gets put on those once a year tests also gets assessed on district interim assessments and probably, because the teacher’s job depends on those scores, on the teacher’s own assessments and assignments throughout the test.
I’m a parent, not a teacher. I can just imagine how I will feel the first time a teacher informs me that one of my child isn’t grittty enough or doesn’t have enough joy. How does a parent react to such information? Am I defensive because I work too many hours to provide my children with experiences that will bring them joy? Do I sign them up for boot camp or send them to bed without dinner because they’re not gritty enough? Do I tell the teacher she/he needs to not practice psychology without a license? The world HAS gone mad.
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Correction–
on the teacher’s own assessments and assignments throughout the *year*.
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The mania for teaching grit exposes a broader problem in American education. We’ve developed this habit of identifying some valuable abstract quality –grit, critical thinking, problem solving ability –and assume: a. that it’s teachable; and b. that we really know how to teach it, without any strong evidence that these are true. Then we devise programs that purport to teach these things and everyone assumes, simply because they’re called “Teaching Grit” or “Teaching Critical Thinking” that they actually are doing these things. Look, we know how to teach geography and chemistry and Spanish. There is no doubt about this. But once we get beyond teaching concrete knowledge, we’re in fog –where charlatans frolic because nobody really knows what’s going on and, while nobody can say for sure that what they prescribe does work, nobody can say for sure it doesn’t work either. It’s hard to discredit the charlatans when they’re dealing with such fuzzy and etherial stuff. That’s why charlatans still abound in the realm of religion. My view: let’s teach the concrete stuff, the stuff we KNOW we can teach, with creativity and joy and rigor. I bet the other stuff will fall into place. But if we just try to teach the fuzzy and etherial stuff, with just a haphazard smattering of the concrete stuff, we risk not giving kids much of anything real in their school years.
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http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/03/03/468870056/is-grit-doomed-to-be-the-new-self-esteem
Is ‘Grit’ Doomed To Be The New Self-Esteem?
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Surprise, surprise.
It came from the same set of ed reformers and the same set of charter schools:
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/03/when-social-and-emotional-learning-is-key-to-college-success/471813/
“Steve Mancini, the director of public affairs at KIPP, says that its network of nearly 200 charter schools underwent a transformation after David Levin, one of the cofounders, met with some of the leading social-and-emotional-learning researchers, including the psychologists Martin Seligman and Angela Duckworth, in 2008.”
Is it at all possible that our lawmakers can get some diversity of thought and some different opinions applied to public schools? Every single ed reform initiative comes out of the same three charter chains.
Is anyone else ever consulted or listened to?
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What KIPP and other no-excuses charter chains call grit, most people would call coerced obedience.
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The original version of Martin Luther King’s speech
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the coarseness of their grit”
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I agree completely that testing “grit” is a completely insane idea. Children will naturally display varying degrees of”grit”. Parents and teachers will intuitively have an understanding of how much grit a child has and can respond accordinglly. I can’t imagine testing or grading it, or what good it would do. The main reason I imagine doing it would be, sadly, to make a profit.
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Teaching grit is like something out of Brave New World. Why are we forcing teachers to engineer the “correct” personality type and philosophical worldview, esp. when “grit” is clearly just a way to get us more docile and obedient workers? Grit is not going to be about follow-through on a passionate goal — it’s going to be about learning to sit through hours and hours of standardized testing.
With the rise of Trump, we’re at least starting to ask ourselves how we’ve allowed our society to be so fascistic. Trying to teach and engineer personality is one unexamined aspect of this trend.
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Moose, good point. The same point occurred to me. Children like Huck Finn would be medicated.
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Trump would undoubtedly get the highest score on the grit scale.
Is that really the goal we want for children? A bunch of budding Donald Trumps?
“Grit is Good”
If grit is good
Then Trump is great
And understood
That that’s our fate
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Test Threat Culture. This is what people who buy-in to the reformers’ ideas seem to gravitate towards. A sure sign that the adults in this sector themselves viewed school as a place that you only learn because of the threat of the test. They are not people who viewed their own educations as a way to grow your own mind and character. Citizens who likely approached school the same way are not responding to the message that in order to have a nation that leads the world, we need to put drivers into place that favor design thinking over memorization. Note… the private school industry is verrrrrry aware of this and have no intention of chasing common core standards or standardized tests in their schools.
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How does one even test “grit”?
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And what does it mean if someone scores low on a “grit” test?
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