I read on the Schools Matter weblog site that the National Council of Teachers of English will consider a resolution to oppose the use of the Common Core State Standards, and national testing. What about science teachers? What about the National Science Teachers Association?
In their resolution, they directly show that the claims that the common core movement and national testing uses included:
- The American educational system is broken.
- Education must be improved to improve the economy.
- The best way to improve education to have “rigorous” standards, and use national tests measure the “improvement.”
None of these claims can be supported. Not only is there data to show that these claims are false, but the standards and testing movement ignore the real problems that our schools face today, and that is the increasing levels of poverty, and the impact that poverty has on student learning and success. Neither of these movements deals with poverty, and in fact these movements claim that all student should be held to the same standards regardless of where they live. The truth is, the U.S. has highest level of child poverty among industrial nations, and until we deal directly with this problem, we’ll make little progress in reforming schooling.
I have written at length about the relationship between the economy and student learning. Amazingly, corporate leaders, and politicians view our youth as the problem with the economy in the sense that they claim that if we don’t improve student academic test scores, the economy will tank. The Great Recession was not caused by low (or high) student test scores, it was caused by many years of spending on two wars, uncontrolled banking and lending practices, and large financial companies that helped lead the country down the path to a near Depression.
We do need to improve schooling, and learning. We always have believed that. But simply writing behavioral objectives (standards) that are “rigorous” and then testing the heck out of students has not been shown to improve learning.
We need to humanize education, not dehumanize it. The standards and testing movements together are moving us into a space that is not conducive to student learning. We need critical alternatives to reform, as described in Humanizing Education. Paolo Freire put it this way in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
Within history, in concrete, objective contexts, both humanization and dehumanization are possibilities for a person as an uncompleted being conscious of their incompletion. But while both humanization and dehumanization are real alternatives, only the first is the people’s vocation. This vocation is constantly negated, yet it is affirmed by that very negation. It is thwarted by injustice, exploitation, oppression, and the violence of the oppressors; it is affirmed by the yearning of the oppressed for freedom and justice, and by their struggle to recover their lost humanity.