The Wrong Road to Educational Excellence
‘Comparison, a great teacher told me, is the cardinal sin of modern life. It traps us in a game we can’t win. Once we define ourselves in terms of others we lose the freedom to shape our own lives. ‘Jim Collins, Author ‘Built to Last’
In 1994, I stopped working in public education in the United States. Until then, I had been employed in the field for twenty eight years, first as teacher and later as an Asst.
Principal and Principal, in five different public schools in two different states.
When I left, public education was being much maligned as a result of the 1983 A Nation at Risk report that declared: “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.”
It was not an auspicious time to be working in public education in the United State –as it is not now.
I did not leave education; I left public education in the United States and went to work in an international school in Thailand. From there, I went on to work in other international schools:
in Costa Rica, in the Netherlands and in Vietnam. Altogether, I spent 14 years working in international schools before retiring in 2007.
Entering international education, in addition to giving me an opportunity to travel and to live and to work in other countries and cultures and cultures, gave me an opportunity to see if American education was viewed as negatively by people in other countries as it was being portrayed in our own. I had reason to suspect that this wasn’t the case. And I was right.
Each of the international schools I subsequently worked for advertised itself as an international school with an American curriculum and American teaching techniques, and foreigners, as well as Americans in these countries, were eager to enter these schools.
One of the attractions for foreign students was, of course, the opportunity to learn English. Beyond that, these students and their parents cited as appealing the diversity of the American curriculum, the way that students were encouraged to interact with teachers and work collaboratively with classmates. Also appealing was the fact that students were allowed, and even encouraged, to challenge a teacher’s or textbook’s point of view. Parents of non-American students expressed particular appreciation for the various methods teachers used to get students to demonstrate their understanding of a concept or a subject; methods that went beyond scoring well on pencil and paper tests. And finally, these parents said they welcomed the multiplicity of activities in which students could display excellence outside of the classroom.
Non – American parents often told me that the only thing they were expected to do during their own school years was to listen to their teachers’ lectures, copy down the information they were given, memorize it and then show that they could reproduce it on a test. That was the sum of the educational experience they had received. They knew the limitations of this approach and didn’t want their children shackled with it.
This is not to suggest that American education was perfect back then, but rather to caution Americans that there is wisdom in the adage “Don’t throw out the old bucket until
you’re sure the new one will hold water”. Improving students’ math, science and reading test scores is important, as is having them perform well on international assessments like the PISA
and TIMSS, and we should work on this.
But if we become obsessed with students’ performance on comparison tests that assess a limited scope of essential skills, believing that these skills above all others will guarantee our students achieve success in a global environment, we will discover, as many other nations are now discovering, that the bucket just doesn’t hold water.(See link below to Professor Yong Zhao’s PowerPoint.)
The Chicken Little rhetoric that declares us a nation at risk because of our students’
‘poor performance’ on international comparison tests never seems to cease. It continues even though research has shown that test scores, whether they are on international, national, state or other standardized tests are unreliable predictors of future success and that too great an emphasis on them reduces rather than enhances chances for students’ future accomplishments.
Researcher, Keith Baker’s has made this point convincingly in ‘’Are International Tests Worth
Anything ?’’ published in Phi Delta Kappan in Oct 2007.
There are two roads for American education to follow. One, the wrong one, turns down a narrow path that restricts our view of academic achievement primarily to performance on standardized comparison test. The other, the one less travelled by, is more expansive. While it acknowledges that standardized testing has some value in assessing academic performance,
it doesn’t overrate its value either. Instead, this road provides a multitude of ways for individuals to develop and demonstrate their talents and skills. This is the road that once made American education the standard others wished to follow. Do we really want to abandon it