We Are Being Played (So Fight On!)
Really, really hate to be a Negative Nancy.
Hopefully, in a few months time, anyone who likes will able to say, “Look, Emily, you were wrong about all this testing stuff,” and I will gladly – gladly – eat my words.
But… I think we are being played.
I think that what we heard from the White House today about limiting testing is but a bone we have been thrown as we are ushered into an era of next-gen ed reform, where testing is all formative, all the time.
For those not familiar with eduspeak, “formative” assessment refers to the tests students take on their way to the end-of-year test. When they are crafted and analyzed thoughtfully, and made by the teacher who knows the child, they are a normal part of every day schooling. You took formative tests when you were a kid. They were called quizzes.
In the brave new world of next-gen ed reform, however, formative tests are corporate-designed and digital, and are part of a system of schooling called “competency-based,” (also “proficiency-based,” “mastery,” “customized,” etc.), in which students take “on-demand” tests to demonstrate mastery before being allowed to move on to the next skill in a sequence.
I’ve written about this at length on this blog. It’s not new, and it’s a concept that’s no different than the one that lies at the heart of this quote that I’ve pulled from an article written in 1977:
“The materials will be standardized, the lessons will be standardized,” Guines said. “We’re taking the play out. We’re taking the guesswork out. We’re putting in a precise predicted treatment that leads to a predicted response.”
Guines said the new curriculum is based on the work in behavorial psychology of Harvard University’s B. F. Skinner, who developed teaching machines and even trained pigeons during World War II to carry bombs and detonate them.
The basic idea, Guines said, is to break down complicated learning into a sequence of clear simple skills that virtually everyone can master, although at different rates of speed.
As Morna McDermott writes in this blog post found on the National Education Policy Center website, the current shift to competency-based (personalized) education has been over a decade in the making. Investors have been pouring billions into online and digital learning companies, while policy has been carefully crafted behind the scenes to support the shift to “personalized” (digital) learning.
As Tom Vander Ark (former executive at the Gates Foundation and now partner at Learn Capital which manages a giant portfolio of online and digital learning companies) writes in this article, the shift from the big-test to many mini-tests is part of this transformation.
Go here for a blog post I wrote several months ago, just after Maine pulled out We Are Being Played (So Fight On!) | Save Maine Schools:
