Teaching to the Test

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The following is from Thomas Sowell. Ever wonder why? pp. 356 - 358.

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Teaching to the Test

Florida's school year has already started early, so that its students will have more preparation before the state-mandated tests that will be administered to them later in the school year. Meanwhile, there is much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth because so much classroom time is spent "teaching to the test" as our "educators" put it.

Unfortunately, most of the people who call themselves educators have not been doing much educating over the past few decades, as shown by American students repeatedly coming in at or near the bottom on international tests. That is why some states are trying to force teachers to teach academic material by testing their students on such material, instead of relying on the inflated grades and high "self-esteem" that our schools have been producing, instead of producing knowledge and skills.

While our students spend about as much time in school as students in Europe or Asia, a higher percentage of other students' time is spent learning academic subjects, while our students' time is spent on all sorts of non-academic projects and activities.

Those who want to keep on indulging in popular educational fads that are failing to produce academic competence fight bitterly against having to "teach to the test." It will stifle "creativity," they complain. The author of a recent feature article in the New York Times Magazine declares that "genuinely great teaching—the sort of thing that Socrates and his spiritual descendants have delivered" will be discouraged by having to "stuff our charges with information" in order to pass tests.

If there has actually been such "genuinely great teaching," then why has there been no speck of evidence of it during all these years of low test scores and employer complaints about semi-literate young people applying for jobs? Why do American students learn so much less math between the 4th and the 8th grades than do students in other countries? Could it be because so much more time has been wasted in American schools during those four years?

Evidence is the one thing that our so-called educators want no part of. They want to be able to simply declare that there is genuinely great teaching, "creative" learning, or "critical thinking," without having to prove anything to anybody.

In states where tests have been mandated by law, the first order of business of the teachers' unions has been to introduce as much mushy subjective material as possible into these tests, in order to prevent anyone from finding out how much—or rather, how little—academic skills they are actually providing their students.

The more fundamental question is whether our educational establishment has even been trying to impart academic skills as a high priority goal. Over the past hundred years, American educators have been resisting the idea that schools exist to pass on to the next generation the basic mental skills that our culture has developed. They have said so in books, articles, speeches—and by their actions in the schools.

Since the rise of teachers' unions in the early 1960s—which coincided with the decline of student test scores—the education establishment has increasingly succeeded in de-emphasizing academic skills. In that sense, our schools have not failed, they have succeeded in changing the goals and priorities of education.

Despite all-out efforts by the education establishment to blame the declining educational standards in our schools on everything imaginable except the people who teach there—on parents, students, television, or society—the cold fact is that today's students are often simply not taught enough academic material in the first place. Even if there were flawless parents, perfect students, no television, and no problems in society, students could still not be expected to learn what they were never taught.

In fact, it is a lot to expect the teachers themselves to teach what they do not know or understand. Tests have repeatedly shown, for decades on end, that college students who go into teaching score at or near the bottom among students in a wide variety of fields. No wonder they dislike tests! And no wonder that they find innumerable fads more attractive than teaching solid skills, which they themselves may not have mastered.

Part 2

One of the objections by the educational establishment to state-mandated tests for students is that this forces the teachers to teach directly the material that is going to be tested, instead of letting the students "discover" what they need to know through their own trial and error, under the guidance of teachers acting as "facilitators" from the sidelines.

In other words, the students should not simply be taught the ready-made rules of mathematics or science, but discover them for themselves. The fact that this approach has failed, time and again, to produce students who can hold their own in international tests with students from other countries only turns the American education establishment against tests.

"Discovery learning" is just one of the many fads in education circles today. Only someone with no real knowledge or understanding of the history of ideas could take such a fad seriously.

It took more than a century of dedicated work by highly intelligent economists to arrive at the analysis of supply and demand that is routinely taught in the first week of Economics One. How long are novices in economics supposed to flounder around trying to "discover" these same principles?

Nobody believes that the way to train pilots is to let them "discover" the principles of flight that the Wright brothers arrived at—after years of effort, trial and error. Would anyone even try to teach people how to drive an automobile by taking them out on a highway and letting them "discover" how it is done?

The issue is not what sounds plausible but what actually works. But judging one method of teaching against another by the end results that each produces is the last thing that our fad-ridden educators want. That is at the heart of their objections to having to "teach to the test" instead of engaging in "creative" teaching and "discovery learning" by students—as they arbitrarily define these terms.

The education establishment's bitter opposition to the testing of students by independent outsiders with standardized tests is perfectly understandable for people who do not want to have to put up or shut up. For decades, the ultimate test of any teaching method has been whether it was fashionable among educators.

Educational philosophies that have been put to the test in other countries—Russia in the 1920s and China in the 1960s, for example—and which have failed miserably there, as they are now failing here, continue in vogue because there are no consequences for failure here. Not so long as teachers have iron-clad tenure and get paid by seniority rather than results.

At the heart of the problem of educational failure is the low academic quality of the people who become teachers and principals. This low academic quality has been documented by empirical research so many times, over so many years, that it is incredible how this crucial fact gets overlooked again and again in discussions of the problems of our schools.

So long as teacher training courses in education schools are Mickey Mouse, they are going to repel many intelligent people who would like to teach, and we are going to be left with the dregs of the college students. When the resulting pool of "certified" teachers consists disproportionately of these dregs, do not expect them to be even intellectually oriented, much less intellectually competent.

It is impossible to understand what is happening in our schools without understanding the kind of people who run them. But, once you see the poor academic quality of those people, you can easily understand why textbooks have been dumbed down and why there is such bitter opposition by educators to letting exceptionally bright children be taught in separate classes with more advanced material. Do not expect intellectual losers to look favorably on intellectual winners.

Such teachers are the natural prey of education gurus pushing non-intellectual fads with glittering names. If you got rid of every single counterproductive fad in our schools today, but left the same people in place, this would lead only to a new infusion of different counterproductive fads tomorrow.

And there would still be the same bitter opposition to "teaching to the test," which spoils their self-indulgences.

Part 3

While we ought to learn from our own experiences, it is even better to learn from other people's experiences, saving ourselves the painful costs of the lessons. In the case of the dominant educational fads of our times, many have been tried out before in other countries. Their failures there should have warned us that they were likely to fail here as well.

Our education establishment's objections to "teaching to the test" are echoes of what was said and done in China during the 1950s and 1960s, when examinations were de-emphasized and non-academic criteria and social "relevance" were given more weight. In 1967, examinations were abolished.

This was an even bigger step in China than it would be in the United States, for China had had extensive examinations for more than a thousand years. Not only were there academic examinations, for centuries most Chinese civil servants were also selected by examinations.

A decade after academic examinations were abolished in China, the Ministry of Education announced that college entrance examinations "will be restored and admittance based on their results." Why? Because "the quality of education has declined sharply" in the absence of examinations and this had "retarded the development of a whole generation of young people."

Mao's successor, Deng Xiaoping, complained about "the deterioration of academic standards" and said, "schools have not paid attention to educational standards and instead overemphasized practical work; students' knowledge of theory and basic skills in their area of specialization have been disregarded."

None of these failing educational fads was unique to China. They went back to the teachings of John Dewey, whose "progressive" ideas shaped developments in American schools—and especially American schools of education, where future teachers were trained. Moreover, Dewey's ideas were tried out on a large scale in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, before they had achieved similar influence in the United States.

During a visit to the Soviet Union in 1928, Dewey reported "the marvelous development of progressive educational ideas and practice under the fostering care of the Bolshevik government." He noted that the Soviets had broken down the barriers between school and society, which he had urged others to do, and said "I can only pay my tribute to the liberating effect of active participation in social life upon the attitude of the students."

Here we see the early genesis of the current idea in today's American schools that the children there should be promoting causes, writing public figures and otherwise "participating" in the arena of social and political issues. Another progressive educator, W. H. Kilpatrick, was likewise exhilarated to find that his books were being used in Soviet teacher training programs.

Kilpatrick was also delighted to learn that the three R's were not being taught directly but were being learned "incidentally from tasks at hand." Here was the basic principle behind today's "discovery learning."

Even as visiting progressive educators from America were gushing over the use of their ideas in Soviet schools, the bad educational consequences were turning the Soviet government leadership against these fads. The commissar who had imposed progressive education on Soviet schools was removed shortly after John Dewey's visit.

When the romantic notions of progressive education didn't work, the Soviet and Chinese governments were ably to get rid of them because they were not hamstrung by teachers' unions. They were able to restore "teaching to the test"—which was not very romantic, but it worked.

The "barriers between school and society," which Dewey lamented, existed for a reason. Schools are not a microcosm of society, any more than an eye is a microcosm of the body. The eye is a specialized organ which does something that no other part of the body does. That is its whole significance.

You don't use your eyes to listen to music. Specialized organs have important things to do in their own specialties. So do schools, which need to stick to their special work as well, not become social or political gadflies.

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24 May 2024