Self Correcting?

The educational world is all a-flutter about the poor performance of students on a recent battery of Math tests that were administered to fifteen-year-olds in various locations around the world. In my daily ingestion of “content”, I heard pretty much the same refrain from officials here in Canada, in the United States, and there was a feature report on the matter on the Journal Télévisé from France 2 in their daily 19-20 slot. There was a great deal of hand-wringing from official circles whose answer to poor test scores seems to be more testing, test prep, accountability, and choice, all mantras of a segment of the educational institutions dominated by market-driven precepts and the desire to standardize everything. The best of the reports of yesterday’s lot was some documentation in the France 2 segment wherein they compared student life in France to that of young people in South Korea, whose students scored excellent marks on the PISA. The first distinction mentioned was that Korean students spend, typically, sixty hours a week in school, whereas their French counterparts spend half that total. The Korean girl followed by the reporters started her day at six in the morning, went to school at eight and stayed there until ten in the evening, after which she attended private tutoring until midnight. She seemed quite comfortable with the situation, as did her parents, but I know I wouldn’t have done this to my own children, nor to students in general, given a sense that much learning takes place outside of school, particularly in terms of interpersonal relationships, life experience, and general cultural development. If the point is to become a drone in the commercial and industrial apparatus, the Korean/Singaporean/Japanese/Hong Kong model will serve well, I suppose, but in terms of building a sustainable and humane society, it’s likely that the hive mentality will leave serious shortfalls. PISA, the brainchild of the OECD, is aimed squarely at reinforcing the current economic paradigm, and it bending the drive of the education system worldwide to that effect, this being the paradigm in which growth in a finite living space has no limits and where we can create wealth out of thin air and distribute said wealth unequally to the point of ridicule. It favours a lock-stepped standardized, modular and cellular education that gives pride of place to narrowly focused knowledge of the quantifiable, and where progress is measured only on the basis of single-event high stakes testing, much of it framed as multiple-choice questions in the interest of statistical purity.

There has been substantial and well-documented push back against the tide of stats-driven education and the drive to turn education into a profit source, but it doesn’t often spill into the arena of public discussion, not surprising given the vested interest of the organs of the press in support of their own corporate model. Diane Ravich recently published an article on the Huffington post which I saw republished on Common Dreams, entitled “What You Need To Know About International Test Scores”, in which she cites an article from Phi Beta Kappan by Keith Baker (2007), saying the following:

Baker wrote that a certain level of educational achievement may be “a platform for launching national success, but once that platform is reached, other factors become more important than further gains in test scores. Indeed, once the platform is reached, it may be bad policy to pursue further gains in test scores because focusing on the scores diverts attention, effort, and resources away from other factors that are more important determinants of national success.” What has mattered most for the economic, cultural, and technological success of the U.S., he says, is a certain “spirit,” which he defines as “ambition, inquisitiveness, independence, and perhaps most important, the absence of a fixation on testing and test scores.”

Baker’s conclusion was that “standings in the league tables of international tests are worthless.”

Ms. Ravich draws some lessons from the test scores, mostly relating to the silliness of accepting that such a measurement would have any meaning other than all the programs aimed at improving test scores have been a dismal failure. My personal favourite, of course, is where she points out that having so many people living in conditions of deprivation does nothing to help test scores, or general education, to which I would add that the impetus to get educated seems increasingly tattered where an education seems more like a path to significant debt loads than to gainful and meaningful employment. Finally, it should come as no surprise that Democrats, both New and U.S., as well as Socialists-In-Name-Only all over the world have done little to nothing to lay the groundwork for a society where an education would be simply part of what the society does and where both work and rewards would be shared on a somewhat more equitable basis.

Please also take a minute to check out Henry Giroux’s writings in this vein.