Suffocating in Standardization
My students spend twenty five full school days a year taking standardized tests. That’s more than the combined total of hours for the bar exam, teacher certification and MCATS. In other words, the test we develop to see whether an eighth grader understands the Pythagorean Theorem is longer than the tests we create for doctors, lawyers and teachers.
And yet . . .
The enemy isn’t the test. The enemy isn’t Waiting for Superman, either. Nor is it Rhee or Duncan or Gates. The enemy isn’t a single, solitary human or even a single, solitary idea. Instead, the real issue is the process of standardization.
I’m not sure it’s a new enemy, either. It’s the same enemy that forced hemlock on Socrates and the same enemy that killed Jesus and the same one that led to the excommunication of Galileo. It’s the confusion of uniformity for unity and efficiency for effectiveness.
Here in America, it began when we first created factory-model schools. We adopted the industrial model to prepare students for jobs
