A Sports Metaphor

I bet most of the 5 people who read this blog don't pay that much attention to the "current issues" in education.  Which is fine; I don't pay much attention to the current issues facing doctors or lawyers or auto mechanics.  In any event, one of the current issues facing schools is standardized testing.  George Bush's "No Child Left Behind" act and Obama's "Race to the Top" legislation are both education laws that severely amp up the importance of testing in evaluating schools, teachers, students, etc.  I would not be surprised if soon somebody tried to figure out how to evaluate the bus drivers, janitors, maintenance staff, and cafeteria workers based on student test scores.  It's ridiculous, and counterproductive.

A few months ago I was discussing education with my brother-in-law Lee, who is not a teacher.  (He is a hot air balloon pilot, though, and I still haven't gone up with him.  It's on my To-Do list.)  Anyway, the subject of testing came up and I dismissed test scores as unimportant; I think he thought my dismissal a little too cavalier, countering that tests are how we know if students are learning.  Now, there are mountains of evidence, well researched and documented by people in the field of education, which shows that testing really tells us very little about what children know and can do.  But if you are not a teacher, or if you work in the Education Department of the federal government or any state, you don't read this evidence.  (If you are not a teacher I don't blame you; I don't read the Journal of the American Medical Association.  As for the people in government, that's another post.)

Anyway, here is what I said to Lee, who also happens to coach basketball at his Alma mater.  Imagine that you have a few weeks to prepare your basketball team for the first game of the season.  On the first day of practice you decide that their dribbling skills are insufficient, so you spend the weeks leading up to the first game doing dribbling drills.  By the first game your players can dribble forwards, backwards, with both hands, they can crossover, dribble between the legs, behind the back... and that's it.  They can dribble.  You spent every moment of practice dribbling.  You don't know who is a good shooter, or passer; you don't know who plays good defense; you haven't taught them what kind of defense to play or what offensive plays to run.  You have 12 players who can dribble a basketball, and even then, owing to the differences between them, some will be better at it than others.

That's what the testing craze in education is like.  A test is just one way we can evaluate ability, just like dribbling is one aspect of the game of basketball.  But schools today are forced by laws (No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top) which can defund and even close schools based on test scores to focus all their energies on tests in a few subjects.  If students aren't taking tests, they are taking practice tests, or they are learning "test taking skills," which is really just a fancy way of saying that we are teaching them how to game the test, or they are filling in test-prep workbooks sold to the schools by the same companies that make the tests (and that is a HUGE racket.)  Result: basketball teams that can only dribble, and school kids that can only take tests.  And in the "real world" the ability to take a test is about as worthwhile as the ability to dribble a basketball.

At one point in our conversation Lee's eyes lit up; it had just dawned on him that he got good grades in school, and liked school, and was considered a good student... and he was a good test taker.  On the fictional team, Lee would be a star dribbler.  By the way, I would have been too.  But it's not important, because being good test takers didn't really help us in the long run.  Even the good dribblers (test takers) are never allowed to find out if they are good shooters or passers or defenders.  And teachers have to go out of their way, sometimes even defy the powers that be, in order to figure out what other skills their students have besides "test taking skills."  (Oh, and by the way, if you want to know why kids get bored in school, imagine being on the team that spends every practice dribbling.  Even the ones who are good at it are bound to get tired of it.  What student runs into class and shouts, "Can we do more test prep today?  Can we take another test?  Can we eschew all experiential and engaging forms of learning in favor of mindless and repetitive test preparation that teaches us skills which will be entirely useless the second we exit this building?  Yippee!!"  I mean seriously, when was the last time the ability to answer a multiple choice question played a huge role in the direction of your life?)

As a last note, if you do have kids, I think you should ask them, "What did you do in school today?"  But emphasize the word "do."  Make them tell you what they actually physically did.  If the answer is, "We sat in desks and filled in bubbles, then figured out who filled in the right bubbles, and learned tricks and techniques for knowing which bubble is right," then I think you can see the problem.  I am going to go practice my jump shot.

J