There are a lot of things to dislike about contemporary trends in American educational “assessment.” Some of the common complaints, however, seem to me to be a little ad-hoc. For instance, one can certainly object that quantitative measures are not the best way to go about assessing educational effectiveness — but that critique can also appear opportunistic in light of the fact that grades and exams were a central part of the pre-“assessment” regime.

The key critique of this regime, it seems to me, is its completely unscientific nature. There are countries that are generally agreed to be doing a better job of educating their population than the US. The way they run their systems is public knowledge, and I’m sure they would be happy to clarify about any questions we might have. Indeed, we could probably bring in a team of Korean or Finnish assessors to help us figure out how we could emulate them better.

What we’ve chosen to do instead is to implement a completely new and unprecedented system, made up of new standards of measurement and new types of “accountability.” We have no particular reason to believe that this system will actually produce better results. If anything, we have reason to believe the opposite, insofar as the most successful countries are doing nothing of the sort — to say nothing of the fact that these policies are being promoted by such luminaries as Bill Gates, whose expertise at creating cheap knockoffs of other companies’ software gives him unique insight into how to improve the American educational system.

And what if the assessment regime doesn’t wind up producing better results? I think we all know what the conclusion will be then: we need to assess harder.

Neoliberal educational ideology would have it that education is finally about job skills. Many have lamented this narrow focus as an impoverished view of what education should do and have argued in favor of a renewed emphasis on the humanities (in the interest of more holistic formation of character, training up in the duties of critical citizenship, etc.). I am very sympathetic with all those views. I would like to suggest, however, that they do not go far enough, because they accept the notion that it’s possible for formal education to be directed purely at job skills.

Yet there’s always something excessive in formal education, something that cannot be captured in a pure utilitarian calculation — that’s what makes it “education” rather than simple “training.” Furthermore, that excessive element corresponds to society’s own self-image. In what it forces kids to learn, over and above any straightforward utility, a society is telling a story about itself and its aspirations.

Continue reading “The dialectic of math education” →

Why should we trust Bill Gates to overhaul our education system when the man clearly doesn’t even know how to comb his own hair?!

Maybe instead of presuming he knows a lot about education due to his success in stealing other people’s ideas, he should just give money to plug budget school districts’ budget holes — in fact, he probably has more than enough money to start up an endowment that could permanently increase the amount of funding available to school districts. But no! The “genius” CEO needs to intervene in policy matters! This from the man who can’t come up with a way to install software updates without rebooting! What a way to run our society!