1. FORWARD ... INTO THE PAST
1. Kamii et al., 1994, p. 675.
2. Everything quoted in this paragraph appears in Pines, 1982, pp. 112–15,119. For another, very similar definition, see Brodinsky, 1977.
3. Kantrowitz and Wingert, 1989, p. 52.
4. Zemelman et al., 1998, p. 287.
5. This is from the behaviorist Alyce Dickinson (1989, p. 12), who puts the phrase intrinsic motivation between quotation marks in the title of her article, as though to call the very existence of the phenomenon into question. (This is a telltale sign of Skinnerian orthodoxy.) Nevertheless, Skinner and his acolytes insist that their theory sees the learner as active because he or she (or it) overtly responds to environmental stimuli, emitting certain behaviors that are reinforced. But, as a group of scholars hasten to explain, this is quite different from what cognitive theorists mean by active. "Rather than passively receiving and recording incoming information, the learner actively interprets and imposes meaning through the lenses of his or her existing knowledge structures, working to make sense of the world" (Putnam, 1990, p. 87).
6. These terms are a trifle misleading because the kind of schooling defended in this book requires both students and teachers to be actively involved, making decisions and pursuing ideas. By contrast, in this era of imposed standards and mandated curricula, teachers and students have both been relegated to the periphery (a point made by Goodman, 1992, p. 127). Our children are more likely to receive a legislature-centered education.
7. E. D. Hirsch, Jr. (1996, p. 49), refers with a straight face to "decades of progressivist intellectual dominance." William Damon (1995, pp. 102, 104), one of the many conservative education professors whose collective existence belies conspiratorial claims about how radicals have taken over the field, sounds a similar theme: "child-centered doctrines are fast dominating schooling" and "the constructivist perspective has come to dominate the educational scene." The same claims are made by right-wing talk show hosts, newspaper and magazine columnists, and others too numerous to list. I don't believe I've ever seen any of them offer empirical evidence to document these assertions, although the same few anecdotes of nontraditional classrooms get passed around and repeated endlessly.
8. "To most people—even most educators—there isn't a dominant paradigm of schooling because there is only one kind of schooling, the kind we have" (Wolk, 1998, p. 5).
9. Many of them look the same because they are the same. But even recently constructed schools typically have the same walkway to a central entrance, the same flagpole, the same brick construction. Inside, meanwhile, Linda Darling-Hammond (1997, p. 149) describes how it's still the case that "the office is the first thing one sees, the quietest and best-outfitted part of the school, a forbidding place with its long high counter separating the office staff from others who enter. The next sight is a glass-enclosed trophy case and a bulletin board of announcements about meetings, sports events, and rules to be followed. Long clear corridors of egg-crate classrooms are broken by banks of lockers and an occasional tidy bulletin board. Classrooms look alike, teachers' desks at the front of each room commanding the rows of smaller desks for students." A high school in particular is likely to set aside most of its public display areas for documenting how its students have defeated those from other schools and which of its students are better than others.
10. For a challenge to this view from a group of optimistic progressives, see Zemelman et al., pp. 276–77: "The cyclic vacillations between authoritarian and progressive education in this culture are not random pendulum swings, but advances and retreats along a battlefront—the playing out, over a huge span of time, of a war for the soul of schooling in this society. In the end, the student-centered, developmental approach will win out over the authoritarian model because it parallels the direction in which civilization itself progresses.... Each time the progressive set of ideas comes back, it gains strength and coherence from the new research and practice that connects with it, and each time it appears it exerts more influence on the schools before it is once again suppressed." I don't know if this assessment is accurate, but I'd certainly like to think so.
11. The first quotation is from Cuban, 1988, p. 341; the second, from Cuban, 1984, p. 238.
12. Newmann, 1992a, pp. 186, 203. "We have seen numerous examples of teachers and students engaged in the 'new' pedagogy: interesting, hands-on science projects; students working cooperatively to solve applied mathematics problems; intense debates where students analyze historical episodes to clarify their reasoning on persisting public issues; creative writing that uses literature to illuminate a personal experience. These provide glimpses of an alternative curriculum model. But the isolated examples have not yet been synthesized into total school programs. Only a few teachers, students, and parents have experienced them" (p. 186).
13. Cohen and Barnes, 1993, p. 241.
15. Ellen Lagemann is quoted in Gardner, 1991, p. 196. (Exactly the same contrast between Dewey and Thorndike—and the same conclusion—is offered by Farnham-Diggory, 1990, p. 28.) Even in the mid-1970s, supposedly a high mark for progressive teaching, David Hawkins (1974, p. 162) observed that Dewey actually had an "almost negligible influence in our educational theory and practice." At least one scholar, Lawrence Cremin, would dispute that view. Perhaps the most persuasive conclusion is that "Dewey's educational philosophy is widely cited as theory" but has almost always been "widely ignored in practice" (Sharan, 1990a, p. 33).
16. Goodlad, 1984, esp. p. 229.
18. Goodlad, 1999, p. 573. He also wrote, "I have no doubt that a study today would reveal equally traditional procedures.... Almost everywhere I go, individuals endeavoring to bring about change report that teachers are paying less and less attention to the needs of individual children and more and more to the 'standards' being imposed on them" (personal communication, 1998).
19. The first quotation is from Meier, 1996b, p. 271; the second, from Stipek et al., 1995, p. 209.
20. Cathy Drees, a kindergarten teacher in South Carolina, is quoted in Manzo, 1998d, p. 27. The reporter introduces this comment by saying, with apparent satisfaction, that "even the littlest of South Carolinians are learning what it means to meet higher standards."
21. Kantrowitz and Wingert, p. 52. Also see Darling-Hammond (p. 121): "Hands-on learning in the early grades has been replaced in many schools by desk-bound learning conducted with basal readers and workbooks, and curriculum packages that emulate standardized tests. Play corners, blocks, picture books, easels, and sand tables have disappeared from many classrooms as teachers have been directed to teach for the tests. Young children are asked to learn in ways that are inappropriate for them and ineffective for nearly anyone."
22. Meier, 1995, pp. 32–33. Meier herself and Ted Sizer have made heroic efforts to rethink the nature of high school and to implement a more progressive and rigorous vision of learning; they have offered impressive models for anyone who cares to be guided by them. The trouble is that so few seem able or willing to take that journey.
24. The study was conducted by the Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation, and Educational Policy. See Madaus et al., 1992, p. 14. Emphasis added.
25. Results of the National Survey of Science and Mathematical Education, which gathered data in 1993 from 6,000 teachers at all grade levels, were summarized in Willis, 1995, p. 2.
27. Most teachers described themselves as having a "balanced approach" to teaching reading, but other details suggest that traditional beliefs and practices are still prevalent. Two out of three teachers surveyed said they used systematic direct phonics instruction, giving explicit skill lessons before letting kids try to make sense of words. Fewer than one out of five taught phonics "on an as needed basis," while only one of six teachers taught with trade books exclusively—that is, the kind of stories you might find in a library or bookstore—presumably meaning that the great majority were still using those textbooks known as basal readers. When asked directly, roughly one out of three respondents said he or she could be described as a Whole Language teacher, but the other answers suggest that many identify themselves that way when their practice indicates otherwise.
28. Daniels, 1993, p. 4. While not attempting to offer any quantification, a leading academic opponent of Whole Language agreed that "very few teachers identify themselves as purely 'Whole Language'" (Stahl, 1994, p. 139).
30. Paterson, 1998. Moreover, she found that such bills are disproportionately introduced by Republican lawmakers in states where the Christian Right "has substantial or dominant influence in the state's Republican party."
31. See the first paragraph of note 34, below.
32. Bond, 1997, p. 28. An updated report the following year noted that "the number of states that use alternative forms of assessment exclusively has decreased over the last five years" (Bond, 1998, p. 13).
34. Reading: A 1987 framework for language arts instruction in California called for a literature-based approach to teaching reading, with skills taught in the context of understanding real stories. In 1995 this policy was essentially reversed, and isolated skills were again the order of the day. According to two leading professional associations, the California Reading Association and the California Association of Teachers of English, the newer standards document is "overly prescriptive, overemphasizes decodable text in the early grades, and treats the reading process as a simple sequence of skills" (Manzo, 1998e). What's more, the state legislature now mandates that professional development for reading teachers must be limited to traditional phonics methods; instructors must sign a form stating that they will not teach other approaches (Manzo, 1997). Those who work with teachers are prohibited from using "any program that promotes or uses reading instruction methodologies that emphasize contextual clues in lieu of fluent decoding, or systematically uses or encourages inventive [sic] spelling techniques in the teaching of writing."
Mathematics: A set of guidelines offered in 1992, echoing the recommendation of national experts, suggested that math classes should emphasize problem-solving and help students understand the ideas behind the formulas. Five years later, California's Board of Education moved to reverse that policy and return to computational skills and drill-and-practice techniques. The new policy "emphasizes a direct instructional model that focuses on memorizing the steps necessary to solving math problems, but fails to build an understanding of math concepts," according to the president of the California Mathematics Council, which represents math teachers (Manzo, 1998e. See also Lawton, 1998, and Jackson, 1997.)
Testing: The California Learning Assessment System (CLAS) was introduced in the early 1990s to tap "a broader range of student abilities than traditional tests" did, and to provide "information on what students know and are able to do, not just how they compare with one another." The emphasis shifted a bit toward real understanding and away from memorizing right answers. But not for long. Within a couple of years CLAS was history and multiple-choice testing was back. (See Rothman, 1995, pp. 90–103, and Kirst and Mazzeo, 1996.)
35. Cuban is quoted in Bronner, 1998a, p. 32.
36. The first quotation is from Brodinsky, p. 523; the second, from Feinberg, 1997, p. 32. On the use of standardized tests, see p. 92.
37. Berliner and Biddle, 1995, p. 306.
38. Lemann, 1998, pp. 96, 104. The program is called Success for All.
39. Winerip, 1998, p. 47. The mayor, Bret Schundler, a white Republican Harvard alumnus, enrolled his own daughter in private school. In the same vein, Jonathan Kozol (1992, p. 78) dryly describes the conservative educational theorist Chester Finn's opposition to allocating money for the purpose of reducing class size. That "is 'not a very prudent investment strategy,' said Mr. Finn, who sent his daughter to Exeter, where class size is 13."
40. Strickland is quoted in Routman, 1996, p. 43. Furthermore, this kind of teaching is likely to "bore the students (turning them off to education even more)" (Singham, 1998, p. 13).
43. Lemann, 1997, p. 130. For more information, see Goodman, 1998. Note that some right-wing groups use names that sound neutral, such as Citizens for Excellence in Education, Concerned Citizens for Educational Reform, and the National Right to Read Foundation.
44. "Are Teachers of Teachers Out of Touch?" was the way the New York Times headlined its report of a "survey by a nonpartisan research group" that found many professors of education are more interested in helping students to become lifelong learners than in making them memorize the rules of grammar or training them to be punctual (Sengupta, 1997). As with other newspapers' coverage of that survey (which, as it turns out, was actually underwritten by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, headed by Chester Finn), the reporter simply assumed that the professors were wrong. One wonders whether a survey finding that physicians have different priorities than their patients—promoting long-term health rather than just reducing discomfort, for example—would have been presented so as to exclude the possibility that we might have something to learn from the doctors.
45. Zemelman et al., p. viii. Of course, the fields of medicine and education are not altogether analogous, but it makes little sense in either case to ignore the progress that has been made in theory and practice.
46. As a rule, two Stanford University researchers argue, "higher education institutions place a premium on students' mastery of facts and reproduction of transmitted knowledge as the definition and measure of learning." Even when this is not the case, the admissions committees of these institutions certainly place a premium on that, with the result that even parents who might value critical thinking and problem solving—and therefore might endorse a nontraditional approach to instruction—end up "press [ing] teachers of college-oriented high school students to embrace a transmission-oriented pedagogy" (Talbert and McLaughlin, 1993, pp. 182–83). For different reasons, non-college-bound high school students are at least as likely to be subjected to the same kind of teaching, albeit at a lower level (see Oakes, 1985).
47. The party and even the name of the president don't seem to matter. Virtually all of Bill Clinton's lengthy remarks on education in his 1997 State of the Union message could have been delivered by George Bush or even Ronald Reagan—and indeed, the speech reportedly pleased Republican governors. Clinton went out of his way to assure social conservatives that he supported "not Federal Government standards but national standards." He framed the task at hand not as enhancing the quality of student learning but as making sure the USA was number one in educational performance. He called for competition among public schools and for rewards and punishments to "motivate" teachers. Most of all, he said the solution to our educational problems was more testing (Clinton, 1997). The groan from teachers across the country was almost audible.
48. Interestingly, the Christian Right has opposed not only national standards and testing but also some dreadful state tests, such as the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS), which was fought by the most conservative Republicans on that state's Board of Education. One national leader of the Christian Right regards standardized tests as evidence of government mind control. Those of us who arrive at our opposition from a very different point of departure may be tempted to make common cause with this constituency. Such an alliance will not last long, however, given that these same people are vociferous supporters of a back-to-basics agenda for classroom instruction. ("To those whose world is bounded and defined by religious faith," writes one conservative, "it would be sacrilegious to oblige their children to become critical thinkers and independent questioners of authority" [Manno, 1995, p. 723].) Moreover, the alternative to federal (or even state) mandates is a kind of control at the local level that often continues to exclude the active participation of teachers and students.
49. To cite a few examples: the Committee for Economic Development, consisting of executives from about 250 large corporations, demands that school curricula be linked more closely to employers' skill requirements; it also calls for "performance-driven education," incentives, and a traditional "core disciplinary knowledge" version of instruction (Archer, 1996; Manegold, 1994). Ditto for the Business Roundtable, which describes schooling as "competing in the education Olympics": besides endorsing narrow and very specific academic standards, punishments for schools that fall behind, and more testing, it approvingly cites the example of teaching high school students how to write personnel evaluations (Business Roundtable, 1996). The National Association of Manufacturers, meanwhile, insists on more testing as well as "a national system of skills standards designed by industry" (Zehr, 1998). And the Business Task Force on Student Standards says that "workplace performance requirements of industry and commerce must be integrated into subject-matter standards and learning environments" (Business Task Force, 1995, p. 2). These reports typically receive generous attention from the press. More to the point, such recommendations are increasingly being adopted.
50. Some people in the business world have insisted that their current goals are really aligned with those of educators: corporations today want employees who are critical thinkers and problem solvers, who are skilled at teamwork, and so forth. But if this were true, we would see cutting-edge companies taking the lead in demanding a constructivist approach to instruction, where students' interests drive the curriculum—as well as a Whole Language model for teaching literacy. They would be demanding that we throw out the worksheets and the textbooks, the decontextualized skills and rote memorization. They would demand a greater emphasis on cooperative learning and complain loudly about the practices that undermine collaboration (and ultimately quality)—practices like awards assemblies and spelling bees and honor rolls. They would insist that heterogeneous, inclusive classrooms replace programs that segregate and stratify and stigmatize. They would stop talking about "school choice" (meaning programs that treat education as a commodity for sale) and start talking about the importance of giving students more choice about what happens in their classrooms. They would publish reports on the importance of turning schools into caring communities where mutual problem-solving replaces traditional obedience-based discipline.
The sad truth, of course, is that when business leaders do address these issues, they take precisely the opposite approach: they write off innovative, progressive educational reforms as mere fads that distract us from raising test scores. While there may be more talk in boardrooms these days about teamwork, it is usually in the context of competitiveness—that is, working together so we can defeat another group of people working together. While "social skills" are often listed as desirable attributes, business publications never seem to mention such qualities as generosity or compassion. While it is common to talk about the need for employees who can think critically, there is reason to doubt that corporate executives want people with the critical skills to ask why they (the executives) just received multimillion-dollar stock option packages even as several thousand employees were thrown out of work. Corporations may, as we have seen, encourage high school English teachers to ask students to write a sample personnel evaluation, but they seem less keen on inviting students to analyze critically whether such evaluations make sense or who gets to evaluate whom. What business wants from its workers—and, by extension, from our schools—in the twenty-first century may not be so different after all from what it wanted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
51. I'm not suggesting that corporations should be silenced. Ideally, we would thank business leaders for their advice and say that we'd be happy to consider it ... right alongside the opinions of labor unions, college admissions officers, philosophers, social scientists, journalists, elected officials, and other interest groups. We'd make it clear that when their prescriptions seem out of step with what others are saying and ultimately of benefit only to themselves, those suggestions will be viewed with the appropriate skepticism. Finally, we would acknowledge that the leaders of giant corporations represent financial resources far beyond those of other groups but add that, as we're sure they realize, to give their recommendations any greater weight would violate core democratic principles.
52. As one critic puts it, after summarizing a number of government reports, "The purpose of these reforms, the motivation behind the narrowing of the curriculum, is simply to prepare children for work (and, in A Nation at Risk, for the military)" (Wood, 1988, p. 173).
54. See American Federation of Teachers, 1998; and Education Week's report Quality Counts.
55. A 1998 editorial in the Boston Globe may as well have appeared in the Wall Street Journal or the National Review: it called for "rigorous academic standards and high-stakes assessments," setting children against one another in contests to "motivate" them, making more students repeat a grade, and bringing instruction in line with whatever appears on standardized tests. An educator who wondered if a state exam "is a test that I believe in" is ridiculed for his "confusion" ("A Moment of Truth"). The New Republic likewise endorsed "competitive pressure throughout school systems" and more emphasis on standards, testing, and incentives ("School Haze"). For its part, the influential New York Times seems to have a coordinated policy of advancing a similar agenda in its reporting of education news, its choice of op-ed essays (where balance consists of publishing pieces by commentators ranging from the conservative Lynn Cheney all the way to the conservative Diane Ravitch), its articles in the Sunday Magazine, and the selection of books featured in the Book Review (and who reviews them). Much the same could be said about most other major newspapers and newsweeklies. The only topic on which liberal politicians and publications diverge from conservative has to do with support for proposals that would shift funds from public to private education, such as voucher plans.
56. Daniels, 1993, p. 4. The version of school reform "geared toward accountability and testing ... actually doesn't have any reform in it at all," he adds. "It doesn't say you should teach this differently, you should add this content. It doesn't say anything about the substance or the process of schooling. It offersno resources. It doesn't offer any professional development for teachers. Instead, it issues threats."
57. The late A1 Shanker, the influential former president of the AFT, was nearly indistinguishable from right-wing union bashers on pedagogical issues. He demanded more punitive discipline, more testing, more tracking of students, more use of incentives, and a more structured curriculum emphasizing "'error-free' student work" (Sontag, 1992; Shanker, 1995). Conservatives loved him: Chester Finn said he "agree[d] with A1 Shanker four days out of every five" (in Mosle, 1996, p. 56); Linda Chavez said she "went from [working for] A1 Shanker to Ronald Reagan, and it wasn't such a long leap" (in Hill, 1996). Through its Web site and its magazine (American Educator), the AFT continues to promote remarkably conservative theories and practices and to endorse some of the most prescriptive, behaviorally oriented teaching programs, including Direct Instruction and Success for All.
58. The most visible and energetic challengers of the "scores are falling, schools are failing" position are David Berliner and Bruce Biddle, particularly in chapter 2 of their book The Manufactured Crisis; Richard Rothstein, in a 1998 report entitled The Way We Were?; and Gerald Bracey, who writes a monthly column for the education journal Phi Delta Kappan. Bracey also puts together a lengthy annual report for that journal each October and has published a book on the topic, Setting the Record Straight.
59. This comment comes from Student Literacy: Myths and Realities by Michael Kibby, and is quoted in Calkins et al., 1998, p. 37. Overall, only about half of American high school students take the test; moreover, that percentage varies considerably from state to state. Only 4 or 5 percent of high school graduates—an elite, self-selected sample—take the test in the states that have the highest average scores, while 70 percent or more take the test in some of the states that wind up with the lowest average scores (Rotberg, 1998b, p. 27). Overall, the negative correlation between a state's average score and the proportion of eligible students taking the test is very high: r=—.86, according to McQuillan 1998, p. 96n3. Thus, "if Americans want to raise the nation's SAT scores, they do not need to improve schools. They can do so simply by discouraging any but the top students in every high school from taking the test" (Rothstein, 1998, p. 54). The test is also useless for looking at trends over time because of variations in how many students take the test from one year to the next.
60. I've left out tests of writing because that subject wasn't included until 1984. When scores from that first year are compared with those in 1996, the performance of 8th- and 11th-grade students dropped a little while students in 4th grade did a little better. The 1996 results are from the NAEP 1996 Trends in Academic Progress, prepared by the National Center for Education Statistics in August 1997; the 1998 reading results, which reported small additional gains over 1996 for all three age groups, were released in February 1999 (see Pear, 1999). A mountain of data is available on the Web at http://nces01.ed.gov/naep.
Beginning a few years ago, certain NAEP scores were characterized as "basic," "proficient," or "advanced"—allowing critics of the schools to cite the results as evidence of inadequacy even though the scores haven't changed much over time. Many researchers, however, have called these designations into question because they are arbitrary, because the conclusions based on them "are not consistent with other data on student achievement," and because they "seem to have been established primarily for the purpose of confirmingpreconceptions about the poor performance of American schools" (Rothstein, pp. 70–74).
61. See Elley, 1992. Incidentally, the U.S. score was judged quite high even after the social and economic circumstances of each country were factored into the equation. Fourteen-year-olds were also tested; here, the U.S. score was not quite as high but still respectable: 535, where the range was from 330 to 560.
62. Critics have argued that only a handful of the countries taking part in the study met the stated testing guidelines, with the result that some were testing unrepresentative groups of students in terms of age, income, or number of years studying science or math. "Countries had such different patterns of participation and exclusion rates, school and student characteristics, and societal contexts that test score rankings are meaningless as an indicator of the quality of education" (Rotberg, 1998a, p. 1031; also see Bracey, 1998b).
63. A front-page New York Times article (Bronner, 1998b, p. Al) began as follows: "A major new international study shows that American high school graduation rates, for generations the highest in the world, have slipped below those of most industrialized countries." The reporter than struggled to explain what has happened to our schools, quoting an academic who believes "we should be quite alarmed by this." (The same week, a front-page article in Education Week [Hoff, 1998a] carried the ominous headline "U.S. Graduation Rates Starting to Fall Behind.") It turns out, though, that the study in question actually reported no slippage in absolute terms; on most measures, the U.S. is actually doing better than ever. In 1990, an American five-year-old was expected to attend school for 16.3 years; six years later, that had increased to 16.8 years. Furthermore, 77 percent of Americans between the ages of 55 and 64 had completed "at least an upper-secondary education" in 1996, while 87 percent of a younger cohort (those between 25 and 34) had done so. The drop in rank just reflects the improvement of other countries, which would be regarded as bad news only by someone who is more rivalrous than rational.
64. For decade-by-decade examples of such claims, see Rothstein, pp. 9–20.
65. For one thing, the availability of meaningful work is far more likely to influence the study habits of students than the other way around. For another thing, labor force skills don't contribute meaningfully to the productivity level of a specific industry, given all the other factors that matter a lot more. (See Paris, 1997; Ray and Mickelson, 1997; Berliner, 1996; and the sources cited in Gelberg, 1997, p. 212).
69. Along with a number of conservative politicians and pundits, an economist named Eric Hanushek has challenged the relationship between funding levels and quality of schools. This dispute, like most, is not as simple as it is sometimes made out to be. No one argues, on the one hand, that money makes no difference or, on the other hand, that money is the only thing that matters. Rather, the issues include: Is there a funding level beyond which more money buys less return? Is there a difference between simply correlating achievements to spending across schools (or states) at a given point in time as opposed to investigating what money can do over a period of years? Does money interact with other variables such that it makes more of a difference in certain kinds of schools? And what happens when we look beyond standardized tests to other measures of quality? From a common-sense point of view, it is hard to accept the argument that more money won't help poor schools, if only because affluent school districts seem quite firmly convinced that there are substantial benefits from all the amenities that money has bought them. (No one in the suburbs says, "Money isn't correlated with achievement, so here, you may as well take some of this extra cash off our hands.") From a scientific point of view, a reanalysis of Hanushek's position has suggested that money actually matters quite a lot: Hedges, 1994; also see Wainer, 1993; and Berliner and Biddle, pp. 70–78.
70. Berliner and Biddle, pp. 12, 144.
71. The Dewey story appears in Paul et al., 1989, p. 41.
72. When "Horace Mann's committee of examiners administered the nation's first standardized test in 1845 to five hundred Boston fourteen-year-olds," they found that "when children did answer a question correctly, they frequently did not understand the answer they had given because, as the examining committee put it, the children had been taught 'the name of the thing rather than the nature of the thing'" (Rothstein, pp. 33–34). For modern echoes of this same phenomenon, see the discussion of recent math results on pp. 173–74.
73. See especially Gardner, 1991, pp. 152–66. David Perkins (1992, chap. 2) makes a similar point.
74. Dickinson is quoted in Covington, 1992, p. 181.
76. I should point out that some educational researchers and theorists are explicitly critical of standardized tests—indeed, have built careers on making such criticisms and developing alternative ways of assessing the quality of students' learning—and yet seem to accept other aspects of the Tougher Standards approach to school reform I discuss here, including the economic rationale for pursuing school reform in the first place.
2. GETTING MOTIVATION WRONG
1. Nicholls, 1992, p. 282. The specialist in educational testing, meanwhile, may not "think of children except as they distribute themselves across deciles" (Paul Hogan, former director of the National Council of Teachers of English, quoted in Freedman, 1993, p. 28).
2. Fred Gross, an educator in Sudbury, Mass., is quoted in Willis, 1994, p. 6. He was speaking in particular about teachers who spend a lot of time lecturing to students.
4. Researchers have contrasted a "learning" or "mastery" or "task" orientation with a "performance" or "ego"' orientation. See especially the work of Carol Dweck, Carole Ames, and the late John Nicholls, cited below.
5. Maehr and Midgley, 1991, p. 420.
6. Carol Midgley has documented that "middle school classrooms emphasize performance goals more, and task goals less, than do elementary classrooms," and she has also shown that students' orientations come to match those of the school environment. See Midgley, 1993, and Anderman and Midgley, 1997. (A performance orientation may be stronger in some subjects, such as English and social studies, than others. See Maehr and Midgley, 1996, p. 80.) It is interestingto juxtapose these studies showing an increase in performance goals as students move up through the grades with another line of research showing that their interest in learning tends to decline over approximately the same period of time. See p. 125.
7. John Nicholls, who distinguished between a task and an ego orientation, believed that these are separate constructs rather than two ends of a single continuum. It is possible, as he saw it, to be high on both or low on both. Still, classroom structures often encourage one or the other, leading students, for example, to be a lot more concerned with how they are doing relative to their peers than with whether they have understood something. Nicholls (1989, p. 107) noted that "a person who is task-involved will choose any task that she believes offers an opportunity to exercise or extend her competence. But a person who is ego-involved may have to face the prospect that a gain in competence ... will still leave her feeling incompetent" because success has been defined in comparative terms.
9. Anderman et al., 1996. A study of college students found this sort of interest-dampening effect on the part of those students who did well: the negative effects of being performance oriented (wanting to get good grades or do better than others) didn't hold for students who thought they weren't as successful. This study also found that interest was positively related to being mastery oriented (wanting to learn and understand); see Harackiewicz et al., 1997. Yet another study discovered that the difficulty of the task may be relevant. In this experiment, where fifth-graders were asked to search for words hidden in a page full of letters, those kids who had just been told to do their best were much more likely to return to a difficult version of this task on their own time than were those who had been told that their scores would be reported to their teacher (Hughes et al., 1985).
10. See especially Diener and Dweck, 1980. The quotation is from Heyman and Dweck, 1992, p. 238.
11. See, for example, Anderman and Midgley; Miserandino, 1996; Mueller and Dweck, 1998.
12. On this point, see Dweck, p. 1045, and Henderson and Dweck, p. 325. Positive feedback can be decidedly damaging if it refers to how smart the student is (Mueller and Dweck).
14. Harter, 1992, pp. 89–90, cites three studies to this effect. Also see Elliott and Dweck, 1988; Maehr and Stallings, 1972; and Pearlman, 1984. It's possible to conclude that people's "natural" inclination is to choose something that requires them to stretch beyond what they're capable of doing easily. The fact that so many children (and adults) play it safe would thus reflect a fact not about human nature but about the exaggerated emphasis on performance in the environments in which they find themselves.
15. A 1985 study to this effect by Bandura and Dweck is cited in Heyman and Dweck, p. 237.
18. Researchers have found that when "an extrinsic motivational set develops, children avoid the pursuit of challenge even when they are no longer being rewarded or evaluated" (Flink et al., 1992, p. 193).
19. Milton et al., 1986. A subsequent study confirmed that a "learning orientation" and a "grade orientation" are inversely related (Beck et al., 1991).
20. Carol Dweck (personal communication, 1993) suggests that parents can encourage their children to associate challenge with enjoyment by saying similar things: "That was no fun—let's do something harder!"
21. Ames and Archer, 1988; Meece et al., 1988.
22. Some evidence, though not all, suggests that college students who are performance-focused may get higher grades than those who are learning-focused (see Elliot and Church, 1997, and Harackiewicz et al., 1997). Also, Conti et al., 1995, found that undergraduates led to think about their scores on a forthcoming test succeeded in recalling more facts in the short run—though not in the long run—than those who were encouraged to think more about the task itself. On the other hand, Beck et al., 1991, found a negative correlation between students' grade-point averages and the extent to which they were "grade oriented"—possibly because students who were less proficient worried more about their grades. More relevant to our concerns here, however, there is contradictory evidence as to whether the grades of younger students are more closely associated with task or performance goals (see Middleton and Midgley, 1997).
23. The study, by Farrell and Dweck, is cited in Dweck, p. 1043.
24. Utman, 1997. One study published too late to be included in that review (Newman and Schwager, 1995) found that low-achieving students solved significantly fewer math problems if they were induced to think about their performance than if they were led to think of them as "puzzles" that would help them "learn new things."
25. First study: Ginsburg and Bronstein, 1993; quotation appears on p. 1470. Second study: Gottfried et al., 1994.
26. For a different, but somewhat overlapping, list of "five separate cognitive and affective factors that would impair performance for performance-oriented individuals," see Dweck and Leggett, 1988, p. 262.
29. Stipek and Weisz, 1981, p. 130.
30. Dweck et al., 1978, p. 268. There is an important caveat here, however: students may think that effort makes the difference and as a result continue to try hard—but only because they feel they're supposed to, not because they take any real satisfaction in it. This is why some researchers argue that the distinction between different goals that students may have for their actions isn't as useful as the different motives or reasons for what they do or for having a particular goal. (See Deci et al., 1996; Covington [1992, p. 71] also contends that "attributions are no substitute for the concept of motivation." Also see pp. 39–40.)
31. Heyman and Dweck, p. 235. Elsewhere, Dweck (p. 1042) observed, "Research shows that children with performance goals are more likely to interpret negative outcomes in terms of their ability."
33. Arguably, it's even worse than attributing success or failure to luck. Luck, like effort, can change. It is widely believed that ability cannot. See Weiner, 1979, p. 9.
35. Butkowsky and Willows, 1980.
36. Mueller and Dweck. Apart from its effect on achievement, having been told that they are smart (as opposed to that they "must have worked hard") also led children to prefer easier tasks, to enjoy them less, to give up sooner, and to compare their performance to others'. These effects held regardless of actual ability level or ethnic background. "Thus, praise for intelligence does not appear to teach children that they are smart; rather, such praise appears to teach them to make inferences about their ability versus their effort from how well they perform" (p. 39)—with potentially devastating consequences when their performance drops.
37. These two ideas are theoretically distinct but closely related, particularly in Carol Dweck's research. She finds it useful to distinguish between people who believe that intelligence is set for life—some people are born smart and some aren't, and there's nothing to be done about it—from those who think that intelligence can be improved through learning. The former view may be faulted as unduly pessimistic or dangerously close to the assumption that whole groups of people are less successful because they're born deficient. But Dweck and her colleagues have also found a very specific, very practical consequence: just by virtue of believing it, students may be in real trouble. And it isn't just harmful to believe this about failure. Kids who do very well in school but believe that people's intelligence is fixed—and who presumably see their own high intelligence as responsible for their success—are also at a disadvantage.
In one study, a group of students were followed from the end of elementary school into junior high school to see how they fared. It turned out that even very confident students didn't do nearly as well in seventh grade as might have been expected from their earlier achievement test scores if they believed that nothing can be done about a person's intelligence. This belief was associated not only with lower grades (even when earlier achievement was taken into account) but with more anxiety about school and a tendency to attribute failure to ability rather than effort. Students were better off if they had a more flexible view of intelligence. Indeed, even those who weren't terribly confident about themselves did better than expected when they got to junior high school if they looked at intelligence this way. (See Henderson and Dweck, 1990; also, Mac-Gyvers and Dweck, 1994).
38. The three explanations that follow, along with evidence to support them, are listed in Heyman and Dweck, p. 235.
39. "Attributing past failure to lack of ability was associated with low expectations of future success" for young children in one study (see Stipek and Hoffman, 1980, p. 864).
41. This phenomenon, vividly described years ago by John Holt (1982), is generally known by social and educational psychologists as "self-handicapping" (see Covington, and Riggs, 1992). It can also explain why some students, instead of picking easy tasks where success is all but guaranteed, pick tasks that are much too hard so they can blame their failure on that fact and thereby continue to believe they're very smart. This is more likely to happen in classrooms where students' performance is emphasized and compared (see Urdan et al., 1998).
42. Dweck and Leggett, p. 260.
43. On the Japanese vs. American contrast, see Holloway, 1988. (American children are also more likely than their Japanese peers to point to "some external 'carrot or stick'" when explaining why they do what they do in school: see Hamilton et al., 1989.) For general references on both gender and cultural factors, see Stipek, 1993, p. 131. A study by Ellen Leggett found that "bright girls were twice as likely as bright boys" to view intelligence as something that one possesses in a fixed amount (see Henderson and Dweck, p. 323). On the other hand, there is a fair amount of evidence suggesting that boys are more performance-oriented than girls overall (Middleton and Midgley, 1997).
44. One of the first psychologists to attend to this human need, and the consequences of failing to meet it, was Richard de Charms. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan (e.g., 1985) have refined our understanding of the subject and conducted numerous studies on the role of autonomy in various aspects of human life. Also, there is a huge psychological literature on the related issue of perceived control.
45. Skinner et al., 1990, p. 22. (No, not that Skinner.)
46. Duckworth, 1987, p. 63. The results of that California parent study (p. 33) lend support to that recommendation.
48. Nicholls, 1989, p. 117. This book is an extraordinarily cogent discussion of competition, achievement, and learning. Also on this topic, see Covington.
50. Ames, 1978. Interestingly, this effect was found to be most pronounced in children who have high levels of self-esteem; these children were also more self-critical after losing than after failing.
51. One study (Fry and Coe, 1980) looked at sixty classrooms in twenty junior and senior high schools and found a similarly negative effect when students perceived their teachers as controlling. A second study (Anderman and Young, 1994) looked specifically at students' attitudes toward science and found that they were more negative when teachers encouraged competition, even when students' achievement levels were taken into account. These researchers concluded, in fact, that improving the nature and content of science education may be futile if teachers and schools have created a competitive atmosphere for students. Carole Ames (1992a, p. 266) made a similar point: all the good stuff we offer with one hand, by "designing tasks with challenge or offering choices" to students about their learning, we end up taking away with the other hand if we compare students to, or set them against, each other.
52. See the encyclopedic review of research in Johnson and Johnson, 1989, as well as Kohn.
53. We can readily concede that students are not equally good at what they do, and, moreover, that they will pick up on who among them is a particularly effortless reader or imaginative painter. But this does not justify exaggerating those differences, calling attention to them (for example, by announcing or posting rankings), or making students try to defeat one another. If anything, it's a reminder that we ought to work to reduce the salience and significance of kids' relative standing, to do everything possible to prevent an observation ("I'm better than Stephen in math") from becoming a motive ("I want to be better than Stephen in math").
Here are other things we can do in the face of differences in ability. First, we can expand the number of capacities that we value by having teachers offer students different kinds of tasks to do and encourage different ways of doing them. For the most part, being "smart" or "good in school" is overwhelmingly associated with a narrow band of verbal and analytical abilities. This is problematic for many reasons, one of which is that a large number of students whose strengths lie elsewhere almost immediately come to think of themselves as inferior. (Howard Gardner's work [1983] on multiple intelligences has helped a number of educators to rethink what it means to be capable; others, following his lead, have thought about the practical implications of this theory for schools.)
Second, we ought to encourage students to see ability as something that isn't set for life (see p. 250, note 37). At the least, we can help them understand that higher ability often just means that something comes more easily to one person than to another. I may well have a poorer sense of direction than you do, but that's another way of saying that I have to work harder than you to find my way around. This way of reframing the concept of ability differences can be remarkably liberating.
Finally, teachers can give students a different way of understanding that Allison picks up certain concepts faster than Allen does: it's not that Allison wins and Allen loses, but that Allison is able to help Allen. (This idea is offered in Nicholls and Hazzard, 1993, p. 30.) If some students are always the helpers and others are always the helped, however, this can create a status hierarchy in the classroom that isn't particularly healthy. The answer may be to combine the opportunity to help with the earlier suggestion to provide tasks that require a broad range of skills to complete. The student who was receiving explanations from a peer about the mechanics of long division may switch to giving explanations if the assignment requires students not only to do calculations but to put them to use in designing and constructing a building. For more on the use of varied tasks in cooperative learning for this very purpose, see the work of Elizabeth Cohen.
People who resist such suggestions for minimizing the impact of differences in ability often do so because they think that competition will "motivate" students to improve. Apart from the empirical evidence indicating that this usually doesn't happen (see Kohn, esp. chap. 3), such a belief may suggest a failure to distinguish between different kinds of motivation, a distinction to which I'll return in chapter 5. Or it may suggest a tendency to attribute to "human nature" or "life" what is actually a function of specific practices and institutions. One researcher confirmed that "young people in achievement situations do not always exhibit a clear preference for normative comparisons." Only some students in her study were concerned about how well they did compared to everyone else—namely, the ones who had been encouraged beforehand to focus on how well they could do a task. Others, who had been encouraged to be imaginative (and were therefore focused on the task itself) were later curious to see what their classmates had done rather than to look at everyone's scores. (See Butler, 1992; for a summary of this study, see Kohn, 1993a, pp. 157–58. Another situational factor found to influence whether students look for information about how well they did compared to their peers—versus what their peers did—is whether they were led to explain performance in terms of ability or effort; see Mueller and Dweck, experiments 3 and 4.)
In short, the fact that people have different abilities doesn't justify the significance we attach to ability (as opposed to, say, effort), and it doesn't justify the practices that highlight those comparisons and turn them into a competition. We can "find learning and the exercise of our skills inherently satisfying and gain a sense of competence and accomplishment in the absence of explicit concerns about our ability—without reflecting on how we stand relative to our peers" (Nicholls, p. 95).
54. Elliot and Harackiewicz, 1996; Skaalvik, 1997. These psychologists are less persuasive, I think, when they try to claim that only this version of a performance orientation is harmful, which is to say that chasing success is not a problem. First of all, the best that can be said about the success-oriented performance condition is that it may not reduce intrinsic motivation; there is no evidence that it enhances such motivation, which is often true of the nonperformance (mastery or learning) condition. Second, both ways of emphasizing performance—demonstrating competence and demonstrating the absence of incompetence—have the effect of generating high levels of anxiety (Skaalvik) and discouraging students from asking for help (Ryan and Pintrich). Finally, one pair of researchers clearly failed to replicate the main finding. They discovered that students who were actively seeking success looked pretty similar to those actively trying to avoid failure, and concluded that it's the "distinction between task and performance that is influential," not distinctions between different versions of the performance orientation (Middleton and Midgley, p. 716).
58. For a review of research on self-esteem that debunks its purported connection to academic achievement—but challenges the conservative critics of self-esteem—see Kohn, 1994. (Some of the discussion about failure is taken from that article.)
59. Of course, all things are rarely equal. Different aspects of the situation and different characteristics of the individual help to determine how a given failure will be perceived—and, as we keep seeing in other contexts, the way it is perceived then helps to determine its effects. It matters whether a student was deliberately given too difficult a task in the hope that she would somehow be a better person for failing at it. It matters whether failure was defined on the basis of someone else's judgment as opposed to something intrinsic to the task itself. It matters whether the failure took the form of losing to someone else in a public competition. It matters whether the failure took place in the context of intense pressure to succeed as opposed to a relaxed climate of exploration. It matters whether the student fears ridicule or punishment (such as an F) for having failed or is part of a supportive community where setbacks are no big deal. It turns out that the conditions least likely to make failure a "terrific motivator" (or even to prevent subsequent performance problems) are things like tough standards, grades, competition, rewards and punishments—in short, the practices associated with traditional instruction promoted by many of the same people who extol the motivational benefits of failure.
60. For example, see Parsons and Ruble, 1977.
61. One study (Allen and Wuensch, 1993) found that failure undermined subsequent performance for younger children. Another study (Boggiano et al., 1993) found that it happened for older children, too. Also see Hiroto and Seligman, 1975, and the references in Covington, p. 65.
63. See Deci and Ryan, p. 612; and four studies cited in Deppe and Harackiewicz, 1996, p. 869.
64. See Wigfield; and four studies cited in Stipek, 1993, pp. 130–31.
65. For an empirical demonstration of the difference between mere perseverance at a task and genuine intrinsic motivation, see Ryan et al., 1991.
66. De Zouche, 1945, pp. 339, 341.
67. This quotation accompanies eight citations in Crooks, 1993.
68. For example, see some of the early research reviewed in Kirschenbaum et al., 1971.
69. One of many examples of the success of that masquerade: the National Honor Society has been criticized for inducting students on the basis of their character, leadership, and community service as well as grade-point average. "Three of the four are pretty much subjective," commented the superintendent of an Illinois school district that has begun honoring students instead purely on the basis of their grades, a criterion evidently regarded as nonsubjective (Hoff, 1998b, p. 1).
71. Clark, 1969. Also see Gold et al., 1971.
72. Moeller and Reschke, 1993.
73. Yarborough and Johnson, 1980.
75. Butler and Nisan, 1986; Butler, 1987; Butler, 1988.
77. Anderman and Johnston, 1998.
78. Additional studies: Salili et al., 1976; Hughes et al., 1985 (which found a reduction in interest for challenging tasks but not for easy ones); Kage, 1991; and Harter and Guzman, 1986 (described in Harter, 1992, pp. 89–90). Harter (1978) also found that children seemed to take less pleasure from their success at a task when they knew it was for a grade.
79. See Milton et al., 1986; Beck et al., 1991.
81. Many of the studies already mentioned have found this effect as well: Harter, 1978; Harter and Guzman, 1986 (described in Harter, 1992, pp. 89–90); Kage, 1991; and Milton et al., 1986. See also the evidence finding the same effect from inducing a performance orientation—pp. 29–31.
82. Jerome Bruner (p. 66) makes this point. The relationship is reciprocal, however, since an unengaging curriculum virtually requires the use of grades: without bribes (A's) and threats (F's), students would have no reason to do the assignments. "Let's face it," one group of writers remarked. "Most of our courses are so boring that if you [students] didn't get graded, you'd do only enough work to get by" (Kirschenbaum et al., p. 37). The fact that students are likely to dive in, and do well at, lessons that really are worth doing (see note 72, above) belies the claim that grades are always necessary to keep students "on task." The problem, we might say, is with the pedagogy, not with the species.
83. Krumboltz and Yeh, 1996, p. 325.
84. "No teaching and learning takes place when pop quizzes are given, nor can they be justified as 'motivational.' Pop quizzes are simply punitive measures that teachers employ when they suspect that their students have not learned the material. Rather than spend class time determining what the students have not learned and why, many teachers assume that students have not studied and decide to 'get even.'...[In the case of one such teacher,] confidential discussions with her students revealed that those who cared about grades were learning as much about how to cheat on the quizzes as about the material. Other students decided that they could not win at [her] game and simply gave up. Her colleagues regarded [her] as a tough teacher who maintained high standards. No one asked the students" (Canady and Hotchkiss, 1989, p. 70).
85. Kirschenbaum et al., p. 115.
87. Nicholls and Hazzard, p. 77.
88. Two facts stand out about the research on this question. First, most of it was conducted in the 1970s with undergraduates, and those findings may not apply to younger students. Second, student performance was almost always defined as the number of facts retained temporarily as measured by multiple-choice exams. In any case, the research has produced mixed results, with three investigations finding that harder grading produces limited gains in test scores (Powell, 1977; Johnston and O'Neill, 1973; Semb, 1974), and four finding no difference (Abrahami et al., 1980; Vasta and Sarmiento, 1979; Goldberg, 1965; Driscoll et al. 1983 [cited in Driscoll, 1986]). Again, recall that with meaningful material taught in an interesting way, even the complete absence of grades didn't reduce the quality of students' learning.
90. It is sometimes forgotten that grades are not inherently competitive. If everyone in a class can theoretically wind up with an A, there is no competition involved—although the grade orientation is still harmful for all the reasons already discussed. But if students are graded on a curve, with the number of top grades artificially limited, then any form of cooperation among students has been discouraged because each student now stands to benefit from the failure of others. Moreover, it seems egregiously unfair on its face to decide in advance that no matter how high the level of student achievement, only a few will receive A's. Any instructor who does this is sending a message, not only that her classroom isn't really about learning, but that it isn't even about performance: it's about winning. Sadly, many teachers who do not formally grade on a curve end up making sure the grades wind up distributed in pretty much the same way, perhaps because they believe that this is the way final grades are "supposed to" look: a few very high grades, a few very low grades, and everyone else somewhere in the middle. In fact, this result is "not a symbol of rigor" but "a symbol of failure—failure to teach well, failure to test well, and failure to have any influence at all on the intellectual lives of students" (Milton et al., p. 225).
91. In decrying the alleged proliferation of good grades, one writer offers these analogies: "What good would Siskel and Ebert be if they gave every film 'two thumbs up'? Why would anyone subscribe to Consumer's Digest if every blender were rated a 'best buy'?" (Cizek, 1996, p. 22). Indeed, such ratings would not be useful for their intended purpose—which is to sort movies and appliances for the convenience of people purchasing them. The relevant question, however, is whether this marketplace analogy makes sense for education. If students were commodities to be rated, then one would naturally become indignant that too many were rated highly. But if the purpose of assessment is to provide information that will help students learn more skillfully and enthusiastically—and if an emphasis on sorting actually compromises an emphasis on learning—then our critique will look very different.
92. That finding isn't based on only one study but on a synthesis of thirty-five studies completed in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s (Samson et al., 1984).
95. Milton et al., pp. 147–48.
3. GETTING TEACHING AND LEARNING WRONG
1. Darling-Hammond (1997, p. 228) quotes from 1993 draft standards for history at the fourth-grade level.
2. Ibid., p. 60. The question is taken from the study guide for the 1995 New York State Regents test.
3. Howe, 1995, p. 376. He added that standards are misconceived not only when they are too specific but also when they are developed "narrowly within particular disciplines" (p. 377). Most of what we'd like students to be able to do consists of ideas and capabilities, each of which embraces many different fields. To that extent, distinguishing science standards from social studies standards from language arts standards is not just artificial but counterproductive.
4. House et al., 1978, p. 137.
5. Campione et al., 1988, p. 95.
6. Ibid. Similarly, the "basics" approach to teaching younger children has resulted in their achieving some mastery of "the rules of reading and writing, even as they are learning their addition and multiplication tables," writes Howard Gardner. "What [they are] missing are not the decoding skills, but two other facets: the capacity to read for understanding and the desire to read at all" (1991, p. 186).
7. Whitehead, 1929/1967, p. 1.
8. This teacher is quoted in Prawat, 1989, p. 317. The same position is defended by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. (1996, p. 150): "Higher-level skills critically depend upon the automatic mastery of repeated lower-level activities."
9. Yager, 1991, p. 54. Emphasis added.
11. This is analogous to claims one sometimes hears in favor of the Old School model of discipline or classroom management: at the beginning of the school year, the teacher has to get "control of the classroom" and impose his or her expectations, rules, and punishments on students because an orderly environment today is a prerequisite for helping kids to take responsibility and become empowered tomorrow. In reality, though, teachers who start that way rarely give up control and create a democratic environment later on (see Kohn, 1996a). This may be related to the argument that children can't participate in making decisions about how to act and learn and solve problems because they're not old enough to be given responsibility. Until they've developed sufficient maturity, they just have to do what they're told. Unfortunately, the kind of treatment that follows from that assumption means they may never get to that point.
12. The National Science Teachers Association has been pushing for a reform effort, known as Scope, Sequence and Coordination of Secondary School Science, in which all these different branches of science would be integrated into the curriculum taught every year from seventh to twelfth grade.
13. Whitehead, p. 16. He added: "The uncritical application of the principle of the antecedence of some subjects to others has, in the hands of dull people with a turn for organisation, produced in education the dryness of the Sahara" (pp. 16–17).
15. Wolf et al., 1991, p. 51. Piaget, whose work provides a powerful empirical refutation of behaviorist theories of learning, helped us to understand that there are several distinct stages in children's mental development. The way they think after each of those cognitive reorganizations is different in kind, not merely in degree, from the way they thought before. Jerome Bruner (1966, p. 27), who was greatly influenced by Piaget's findings, explained that "mental growth is not a gradual accretion" but "more like a staircase with rather sharp risers, more a matter of spurts and rests."
16. This example is adapted from one offered by Phil Daro, as quoted in Mitchell, 1992, p. 178.
17. This is true regardless of age and regardless of whether we are quick or slow to understand things. On the latter point, Perkins (1992, p. 14) declared that "thoughtful learning is just as important for slow learners as anyone else."
18. Joy Donlin is quoted in Willis and Checkley, 1996, p. 6. From another source: "It is contrary to what we know about the way children think to begin with contentless computation and only afterwards move on to applications of that know-how in the real world" (Kamii, 1985b, p. 120).
20. Other aspects of the Old School (discussed elsewhere in this book) are similarly hard to square with the "real world": spending the day with people of one's own age; being evaluated largely on the basis of performance at timed, multiple-choice exams; and the typical high school schedule. On the last point, one writer wonders "how many adults would do well at dealing with different job requirements and a different boss every 47 minutes" (Ohanian, 1996b, p. 281).
21. Glasser, 1969, p. 72. In response to this point, E. D. Hirsch, Jr. (p. 156), says that maybe we could look up the facts rather than memorize them, "but few of us will" actually do so. Perhaps this is true; I don't know how many people actually own almanacs, visit libraries, or use the Internet to do research. But what interests me is why it may be true, why some people lack the proficiency or the propensity to go and find out what they need to know. My hunch is that it is precisely the traditional style of fact-based education that often leaves them either unable or unwilling to acquire information after they've graduated. If I'm right, it takes a lot of nerve to turn around and use this outcome to argue for that very style of education.
24. For example, when students in the equivalent of an honors class were asked by a researcher how long they usually remember the content of most of their lessons, one replied, "Ten minutes," and another said, "I've forgotten it straight after the lesson." So you wouldn't be able to recall most of what you're being taught six months later? the researcher asked. "None at all." "Oh no, oh my God no" (Boaler, 1997, p. 175).
27. Darling-Hammond, p. 272. And no wonder: "It is easier to organize drill and practice in decontextualized skills to mastery, or to manage 164 behavioral objectives, than it is to create and sustain environments that foster thought, thought about powerful ideas" (Brown, 1994, p. 11).
29. See, for example, Campione et al., 1988, p. 96.
31. After "intensive drilling on all the kinds of problems they will have to do on the test ... the children are conditioned, like Pavlov's dog; when they see a certain arrangement of numerals and symbols before them, lights begin to flash, wheels begin to turn, and like robots they go through the answer-getting process, or enough of them [do] to get a halfway decent score.... But is this a sensible way to carry out the education of our children?" (Holt, 1982, p. 260).
32. Langer makes a particularly strong argument along these lines, drawing from research to show that "when we drill ourselves in a certain skill so that it becomes second nature," we may come to perform that skill "mindlessly." "Learning the basics in a rote, unthinking manner almost ensures mediocrity" (pp. 13–14).
34. Even "Close!" rankles the really reactionary, who firmly insist that close just isn't good enough, that the answer is either right or wrong. This is just the hard-assed version of the more general phenomenon I'm describing here; my point is that the kinder, gentler version is similarly misguided. Whether we welcome approximations of the right answer or accept nothing short of the real thing, we're still guided by the same problematic pedagogy that stifles thinking.
35. Duckworth, 1987, pp. 64, 131, 6.
37. Brooks and Brooks, 1993, p. 86.
38. Apart from Piaget himself, other people whose work I have cited here, notably Bruner, Kamii, and Duckworth, might be considered his protégés. Thus it is intriguing to consider the possibility that even Piaget didn't go far enough in challenging the preoccupation with right answers. While children make different kinds of errors, Piaget's main point was that their thinking was erroneous, argued John Nicholls. Young children can't see, for example, that a taller, thinner container doesn't necessarily hold more liquid than a shorter, fatter one. "Applied to the classroom, this approach is easily assimilated into the ethic that students must discover the correct answers that are known to their teachers." While conceding that "this is not a necessary consequence of Piaget's perspective," Nicholls went on to say that the model "has no obvious place for dialogue about what question should be asked or what paradigm, in the Kuhnian sense of world view, one should try out. Piaget's is a psychology of puzzle-solving rather than of paradigm-choosing. The later Piaget, if not the early one, always knew what question he wanted to put to children and framed his questions to ensure that they answered his questions rather than others they might have been more disposed to ask. Here lies the key to the power of his work as well as to its limitations" (Nicholls and Hazzard, 1993, pp. 130, 202). James Beane (1997, p. 63) is similarly critical of the versions of constructivist teaching "that simply involve young people in finding their own way to predefined answers within one or another subject area."
39. For example, see Stigler and Stevenson, 1991; Lewis, 1995.
40. The analogy isn't perfect because over the course of a week or two these tourists will at least have tasted the food, met a few people, heard snatches of the language. To be more like traditional education, they would simply stay home and memorize the chief exports of each country.
42. This reminds me of a story told by David Hawkins (1990, p. 138) about another elementary school science teacher who was told she must use some fill-in-the-blank workbooks. "'So,' she said, 'We used them. We weighed them singly and by twos and by threes. We weighed them dry and we weighed them wet.'"
43. Theoretically one could hold such a view while being selective about the facts to be covered, but the reality is that once learning is seen in that way, the sheer number of facts out there creates pressure to cover as many of them as possible.
44. Gardner et al. are quoted in Darling-Hammond, p. 113. Likewise, Lauren Resnick (p. 48) has remarked that "thinking skills tend to be driven out of the curriculum by ever-growing demands for teaching larger and larger bodies of knowledge."
46. This is even more true if, as one study suggests, the tendency to cover things rapidly, so that students are merely "exposed" to them, is most in evidence with "topics having to do with conceptual understanding and application," whereas more time is spent with skill-building exercises (Porter, 1989, p. 12). Of course, it's possible to imagine a style of teaching that errs in the direction of too much depth—graduate education in many fields comes to mind, where students are expected to know everything there is to know about one tiny area and nothing about anything else—but elementary and secondary education now lean so far over in the direction of breadth that we have a long way to go before this becomes a real worry.
47. Newmann, p. 84. Beyond the question of how long these facts are remembered, we could ask an even more telling question: "How much of all that content is an important part of who [we] are today" (Wolk, 1998, p. 35).
48. "Teaching for exposure also may communicate to students that knowing a very little about a lot of different things is more valuable than a deep understanding of a few key concepts" (Porter, p. 12).
49. McNeil, 1986, p. 174. Also, "most teachers felt they could cover more material more efficiently if controversial topics were omitted."
52. Wisconsin's governor Tommy Thompson is quoted in Harp, 1996.
53. The beauty of the Reader's Digest is that you can't really tell whether any given item appeared last month or in 1935. This one was published in October 1969 and was quoted in Silberman, 1970, p. 148.
55. Resnick and Klopfer, 1989, p. 5.
56. No matter how many times it proves fruitless simply to tell, Deborah Meier points out (1995, pp. 138, 144), "we keep feeling sure that if we could but 'tell it right...'" Moreover, "we worry whenever we're not doing the talking.... Teachers who were good at the old style ... miss being star performers."
57. Brooks and Brooks, pp. 39–40.
58. Perhaps it is because the overwhelmingly conservative constituency that supports traditional education can sense that there are political implications to vesting all knowledge and authority in the leader (of the classroom) as opposed to inviting students to play a more vital role in their own education. "The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them" (Freire, p. 54).
59. There's no contradiction for E. D. Hirsch, Jr. (p. 22), however, who sympathizes with such a sentiment and holds that if only students had been given more facts beforehand, they would have learned what the teacher had just taught them. Needless to say, this view is a lot more convenient for teachers, which may help to explain why the transmission approach to teaching remains so widespread.
60. The quotation is from Darling-Hammond, p. 114. For a good discussion of this dilemma, see Searfoss and Enz, 1996.
61. Gardner, p. 243. He adds that schooling is often "done to" the teachers, too, by which he presumably means that a curriculum (and, by extension, a style of teaching) is often mandated by administrators, school boards, state legislatures, and others who presume to control education in the name of "accountability."
63. This metaphor comes from Patrick Shannon. Another group of writers, citing the work of Larry Cuban, notes that this kind of teaching grew out of a search for "new ways to convey the requisite skills to large numbers of average students seen by educators as headed for semiskilled labor. The models they drew on included application forms, shipping invoices, and business letters rather than experiments, essays, or journals. Out of these choices have come the media of most public education: fill-in-the-blank exercises, multiple-choice items, sets of preestablished chapter-end questions, five-paragraph essays, book reports, and science labs that entail no more than verification of someone else's hypotheses and procedures in a highly specified order. The verbs that dominate directions for seat work, class instruction, or tests are complete, choose, and match, not ask, analyze, investigate, or revise" (Wolf et al., p. 40).
64. I discuss this issue at length in Kohn, 1996.
65. Hirsch, p. 218. We'll overlook for the moment his equation of "naturalistic" and "integrated" learning.
67. Meier, p. 4. John Goodlad (1984, p. 244) saw this, too: "We have not fully considered the implications of the grand phrases. How many creative thinkers do businesses need? What kind of nation is one awash with autonomous individuals?" For a classic essay on how schools are designed to prepare people for a life of essential passivity because that is what our economic system requires, see Bowles and Gintis, 1976.
68. Traditionalists who speak of rigor and challenge and excellence usually take for granted that these qualities describe academic subjects such as history and physics. Other skills and tasks are denigrated and even used as a shorthand for lack of challenge: the prototypical easy course is "basket-weaving." As Nel Noddings (1992, p. 147) asks, however, "How many of us can actually weave a serviceable basket?" If challenge were really our criterion, then a rigorous education for people like me would be geared to teaching auto mechanics rather than verbal skills, since public speaking comes pretty easily to me but I have no idea why my car's engine has been hesitating lately. One comes to understand why Dewey (1916, p. 239) flatly stated that "we cannot establish a hierarchy of values among studies. It is futile to attempt to arrange them in an order." Moreover, even if we prefer to confine the discussion to the intellectual realm, Deborah Meier (p. 171) reminds us that "traditional academics [is] but one example of important intellectual activity."
69. For example, a publication by the Council for Basic Education asserts that "standards' significance depends on their relationship to the traditional core academic disciplines" (Pritchard, 1996, p. 5). Not every proponent of standards for instruction in this or that field is an apologist for the current separation of disciplines, but that may well be the effect of their actions.
70. The research, by the Mid-continent Regional Educational Laboratory, found that "even the brightest students would need nine additional years of schooling to master the nearly 4,000 benchmarks experts have set in 14 subject areas" (Marzano et al., 1999, p. 68).
71. Whitehead, p. 6. This, he added, "kills the vitality of our modern curriculum. There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations."
72. Putnam et al., 1990, p. 127. This violates a newer understanding "of learning and knowledge as structured and connected," these researchers add (p. 128).
73. Few schools today rigidly adopt the "mastery learning" model developed by Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues, but "much of the prevalent traditional practice still in place stems from this behaviorist psychology. Behaviorist theory often explains behavioral change well, but it offers little in the way of explaining conceptual change" (Fosnot, 1996, p. 9).
74. Traditional teaching has a way "of taking vitally important material—exciting material—and reducing it to mush" (Noddings, p. 85).
75. Brown et al., 1989, pp. 32–33.
76. It's worth remembering that reading, writing, and math were invented in a context, and for a purpose—namely, to keep track of trade. "Instruction was embedded in practical enterprises that had important consequences" (Farnham-Diggory, 1990, pp. 117–18).
77. One result of—some would even say a reason for—keeping students with same-age peers is that competition among them is more likely to take place. It's certainly easier to sort them by achievement if all the eight-year-olds are together, doing the same thing (see Labaree, 1997b, p. 62). One of the many advantages of "multiage" or "nongraded" schooling is that it fosters a culture of collaboration instead of competition.
78. The best single source on ability grouping continues to be Oakes, 1985. Notice how neatly this practice fits with the dominant model of learning: once it has been decided that knowledge is something transmitted to students, the transmission may be thought to occur more efficiently if the students are sorted by putative ability.
79. Goodman, 1992, pp. 22–23. Carole Ames (1992a, p. 266) similarly remarks that "the prevalence of children 'working on their own' in many U.S. classrooms cannot be viewed as supporting autonomous achievement activity. Students may be doing their own work, but their activity often lacks meaningful direction or is in fact teacher defined and structured."
80. Darling-Hammond, p. 114. She continues: "Their acquisition of these sounds would be tested and graded periodically, but they would receive little practice in real-world contexts or feedback on their efforts. After four or more years of study, they would probably speak about as fluently as most foreign language students do when they graduate from school—that is, far less easily and knowledgeably than today's entering kindergartner does" (pp. 114–15).
81. David Zahren, an instructional specialist in Maryland, is quoted in Welsh, 1990, Bl.
84. This veteran high school math teacher is described as maintaining "standards with a vengeance, regularly ejecting students from his classes and awarding a preponderance of Ds and Fs. This teacher's talk, like that of other teachers who shared his view of students as the problem, was filled with military metaphors—combat pay, front-line, kick butt, line of fire—which reflect his general view of the classroom as a battlefield" (McLaughlin, 1993, p. 91).
4. GETTING EVALUATION WRONG
1. Here are four facts about the SAT that everyone should know:
1. We've come to think of it as a necessary part of going to college, but in its current (multiple-choice) form it has been used only since the 1940s. Realizing that something hasn't always been done helps to remind us that it doesn't have to be done. So does realizing that something isn't done everywhere. Canadian universities, for example, don't use the SAT or anything like it for college admission. Moreover, at least 280 U.S. colleges and universities have stopped requiring that applicants take the SAT—or its equally pernicious Midwest counterpart, the ACT. (See "ACT/SAT Optional," 1997.) The organization that released that information, FairTest, subsequently surveyed some of those colleges and found that most were pleased with the results; applicants, for example, were no less capable when test scores were not required. (See "'Test Score Optional' Admissions," 1998. For a list of colleges that no longer require SATs or ACTs, send a self-addressed stamped envelope to FairTest, 342 Broadway, Cambridge, MA, 02139, or download it from www.fairtest.org.)
2. The SAT doesn't tell us how smart students are. Several years ago the Educational Testing Service, which designs and administers the test, gave up the pretense that it measures students' "aptitude," which used to be what the A in SAT stood for. (For a while it stood for "assessment," but now ETS says the initials don't stand for anything.) The verbal section is basically just a vocabulary test, but even that description is too generous. One study classified students' approaches to studying as "surface" (doing as little as possible and sticking to rote memorization), "deep" (understanding ideas and connecting new material to existing knowledge), or "achieving" (trying to get good grades and beat everyone else without interest in what was being learned). It turned out that those who adopted either a surface or achieving style did the best on the SAT. Scores were negatively correlated with a deep approach to learning (Hall et al., 1995).
3. The only remotely defensible rationale for the test, given how little it tells us about the test-taker's aptitude, is that it helps colleges predict who will succeed if admitted. But studies indicate that it isn't even very useful for that: SAT scores predict only about 16 percent of the variation in students' grades even in the freshman year, and they're worthless for predicting anything beyond that, such as eventual occupational success (Sacks, 1997, pp. 26–27).
4. Far from being a measure of merit (sometimes pointedly contrasted with affirmative action criteria), what the test mostly tells us about is money. There is a direct relationship between SAT scores and family income. The average score for students whose families made less than $10,000 was 873; for $10,000–$20,000, 918; for $20,000-$30,000, 972; for $30,000–$40,000, 993; for $40,000–$50,000, 1015; for $50,000–$60,000, 1033; for $60,000–$70,000, 1048; for $70,000–$80,000, 1062; for $80,000–$100,000, 1084; for $100,000 and above, 1130 ("College Admissions Test Scores by Family Income," 1998; the information is also available at www.collegeboard.org). Even without a graph, you can see that in every single case, the richer the family, the higher the score. One reason for this (though by no means the only one) is that more affluent families can afford those expensive test prep sessions. The fact that such tutoring really does seem to bring up scores should be cause for outrage, not relief.
3. "Few countries today give these formal examinations to students before the age of sixteen or so" (Resnick and Nolan, 1995, p. 102). Moreover, "it is interesting to note that European countries, whose education systems are often touted as superior to ours, have not historically relied on standardized tests at all" (Wagner, 1998, p. 516).
4. "By the time they were ready to graduate to sixth grade last June, New York City fifth graders had taken eight standardized tests over the previous 14 months; this year's fourth-grade reading test ... will take three days to administer. In Chicago, pupils took 12 standardized tests from the winter of third grade through the spring of fourth grade" (Steinberg, 1999).
5. A survey of 250 representative school districts across the U.S. in 1995 found that more than 93 percent reported giving standardized reading tests to children before they had reached the third grade (Dougherty, 1998).
6. Compared to other forms of assessment, standardized tests are a bargain. But given the sheer scope of testing these days, they cost hundreds of millions of dollars that could instead be spent to help children learn.
9. McNeil, 1986, p. xviii. W. Edwards Deming was one of the few people in his field to understand that this is also true in the business world. He frequently commented that the most important management issues simply cannot be reduced to numbers.
10. Mitchell, 1992, p. 134. We may not know who "they" are, but "their" fallibility is brought home to us every so often, particularly when a student taking one of these tests can make a case that, say, "b" is the best answer, or at least that there is sufficient ambiguity in the question to permit several legitimate answers, but at the same time knows full well that "they" are looking for "c" and will count only that response as correct. Anyone who has ever had this experience should understand on yet another level how wide the gap is between higher achievement and higher test scores.
11. Ayers, 1993, p. 118. At the very least, reports of a school's (or district's) average test score should always be accompanied by information about the income levels of the community in question.
12. Rotberg, 1998b, p. 28. A chart in this article provides striking evidence of a correlation between the child poverty rate in each state and its ranking on the NAEP math test for eighth-graders in 1992. The average poverty rate for the five states with the highest test scores was 15 percent; for the bottom five states, it was almost exactly twice that.
14. Norm-referenced tests were used by thirty-one states in 1997, two more than the year before, and they are "not going away" (Bond et al., 1998, pp. 7, 9). Worse, individual school districts often use more of these tests than the states require.
16. For example, far and away the most common method for determining whether students are "reading on grade level" is to look at whether they score above a certain percentile (such as the 50th) on a norm-referenced test. At least two out of every five districts in the country do this, compared with only one out of six that use a criterion-referenced test and fewer still that use other definitions. See Dougherty.
17. The reverse situation actually happened in late 1998 on an international scale. See p. 246n63.
18. Thus, "the better the job that teachers do in teaching important knowledge and/or skills, the less likely it is that there will be items on a standardized achievement test measuring such knowledge and/or skills" (Popham, p. 12; also see 1993, pp. 106–11). Furthermore, because these tests are designed to maximize "response variance" (that is, to spread out the students' scores), they also tend to include the sort of questions that "tap innate intellectual skills that are not readily modifiable in school" and information "learned outside of school." Yet the results of these tests are then used to rate the effectiveness of schools. Popham (1999, p. 14) also points out that the relevance of knowledge acquired outside school, which of course is not acquired equally by all children, helps to explain the high correlation between test scores and socioeconomic status.
19. A survey of parents' understanding of a test in Michigan revealed that "an overwhelming majority ... interpreted the criterion-referenced score as a normative percentile" (Paris et al., 1991, p. 14).
22. Resnick and Resnick, 1990, pp. 71–72. Their overall conclusion: "The tests most widely used to assess achievement are unfriendly to the goals of the thinking curriculum" (p. 73).
23. Madaus et al., 1992, p. 2.
24. Constance Kamii (1989, p. 157) has pointed out that standardized tests may look as though they're tapping logical-mathematical knowledge but to a significant extent are really just tapping arbitrary conventional knowledge. Two math educators give a good example from a Massachusetts test for high school students. The question reads as follows:
n 1 2 3 4 5 6
tn 3 5
The first two terms of a sequence, t1 and t2, are shown above as 3 and 5. Using the rule: tn = tn-1 + tn-2, where n is greater than or equal to 3, complete the table.
This is actually just asking the test-taker to add 3 and 5 to get 8, then add 5 and 8 to get 13, then add 8 and 13 to get 21, and so on. "The problem simply requires the ability to follow a rule; there is no mathematics in it at all. And many 10th-grade students will get it wrong, not because they lack the mathematical thinking necessary to fill in the table, but simply because they haven't had experience with the notation. Next year, however, teachers will prep students on how to use formulas like tn = tn_j + tn_2, more students will get it right, and state education officials will tell us that we are increasing mathematical literacy" (Cuoco and Ruopp, 1998).
25. Wood and Sellers, 1997, p. 181.
26. Bruce Alberts's comments, delivered at the academy's annual meeting in May 1998, were reported in "Science Leader Criticizes Tests," 1998.
27. One study classified fifth- and sixth-graders as "actively" engaged in learning if they went back over things they didn't understand, asked questions of themselves as they read, and tried to connect what they were doing to what they had already learned; and as "superficially" engaged if they just copied down answers, guessed a lot, and skipped the hard parts. It turned out that the superficial style was positively correlated (r = .28, significant at p < .001) with composite scores on the CTBS and Metropolitan standardized tests (Meece et al., 1988). A study of middle school students, meanwhile, found that those "who value literacy activities and who are task-focused toward literacy activities" got lower scores on the CTBS reading test (Anderman, 1992). And, as already mentioned, the same pattern shows up with the SAT (see p. 262n1, par. 2).
30. Delisle, 1997, p. 44. He continues: "With many of the multiple-choice questions having several 'correct' options in the eyes of creative thinkers, scores get depressed for children who see possibilities that are only visible to those with open minds." And from another source: "Good readers, for example, take lots of risks in the process of reading most materials. These risks lead to errors. Depending upon their impact on meaning, these errors may or may not be corrected by the reader. But reading tests, which involve fairly short passages followed by trick questions and answers, require being constantly alert to precisely the kind of insignificant errors that good readers let fall by the wayside" (Calkins et al., 1998, p. 47).
31. The teacher, Marcia Burchby, is quoted in Wood, 1992, p. 32.
35. Robert J. Mislevy is quoted in Mitchell, 1992, p. 179. Actually, it's more like twenty-first-century statistics at this point, and the psychology in question didn't come into its own until the early part of the twentieth century, but you get the idea. Dennie Wolf and her associates (1991, p. 47) contend that "the technology of scoring has become one of the most powerful realizations of behaviorist views of learning and performance."
36. See Frederiksen, p. 199, for a discussion of Herbert Simon's distinction between well-structured and ill-structured problems, the latter being more realistic and important, the former showing up on standardized tests.
37. Bond et al., p. 10; Neill, 1997.
38. "Short-answer questions and computational exercises presented in formats that can be scored quickly and 'objectively'" represent a "typically American style of testing [that] is quite different from traditions in other countries, where more complex problem solving is the norm on both classroom and external examinations" (Schoen et al., 1999, p. 446).
39. Farr is quoted in Checkley, 1997a, p. 5.
40. Frederiksen, p. 199. And from another source: "No multiple-choice question can be used to discover how well students can express their own ideas in their own words, how well they can marshal evidence to support their arguments, or how well they can adjust to the need to communicate for a particular purpose and to a particular audience. Nor can multiple-choice questions ever indicate whether what the student writes will be interesting to read" (Gertrude Conlan is quoted in Freedman, 1993, pp. 29–30).
41. This is roughly analogous to how norm-referenced testing is inherently objectionable but not all criterion-referenced testing is worth celebrating either. In fact, putting the two observations together, it's not hard to find criterion-referenced essay exams that require students to analyze a contrived chunk of text or cough up facts about the Victorian era. The results may not be valid, and the exercise may not be worth it. Moreover, the way these exams are scored raises even more concerns. For example, the essays written by students from two dozen states are not evaluated by educators; they are shipped off to North Carolina, where low-paid temp workers spend no more than two or three minutes reading each one. "'There were times I'd be reading a paper every 10 seconds,'" one former scorer told a reporter. Sometimes he "would only briefly scan papers before issuing a grade, searching for clues such as a descriptive passage within a narrative to determine what grade to give. 'You could skim them very quickly ... I know this sounds very bizarre, but you could put a number on these things without actually reading the paper,'" said this scorer, who, like his coworkers, was offered a "$200 bonus that kicked in after 8,000 papers" (Glovin, 1998).
43. Wiggins, 1993, p. 72. "Thoughtful and deep understanding is simply not assessable in secure testing," he continues, "and we will continue to send the message to teachers that simplistic recall or application, based on 'coverage,' is all that matters—until we change the policy of secrecy" (p. 92).
44. If we need an analogy that evokes the heartland, this one seems more apt: "Measuring the richness of learning by giving a standardized test is like judging chili by counting the beans" (Ferri, 1998, p. 20).
45. Mitchell, 1992, p. 15, and Resnick and Resnick, p. 73, respectively. Lauren Resnick (1987, p. 47) adds that multiple choice tests "can measure the accumulation of knowledge and can be used to examine specific components of reasoning or thinking. However, they are ill suited to assessing the kinds of integrated thinking that we call 'higher order.'"
48. For example, see Goldstein, 1990a.
49. Antonucci is quoted in Daley and Hart, 1998.
51. Freedman, 1995, p. 29.1 am reminded of how the management theorist Douglas McGregor once explained why corporate executives are so fond of incentive plans. He said, in effect, that they like to dangle money in front of their employees because they can—that is, because while they cannot control how people will feel about their work, they can unilaterally determine how much people are paid.
52. Jones and Whitford, p. 280. Also see Frederiksen on this point.
53. Departmentalization, in turn, tends to support other problematic practices, such as giving letter grades and segregating students by alleged ability.
54. Gloria Hoffman, principal of Randolph Elementary School in Arlington, Va., was quoted in Mathews and Benning, 1999.
55. Herman and Golan, 1993, p. 22. It was also common to find staff meetings, as well as conversations between principals and individual teachers, devoted to reviewing test scores and strategies for raising them.
56. Madaus et al., p. 16. This survey included more than two thousand teachers of grades four through twelve in six diverse districts. Also see Herman and Golan.
57. I borrow here from the analyses of Linda McNeil and Lorrie Shepard.
58. The Arizona anecdote comes from a study reported in Smith, 1991, p. 10. The Texas examples are from Kunen, 1997, and Johnston, 1998. (In response to this situation, incidentally, the director of the Texas Business and Education Coalition reportedly commented that "what the state needs is even more testing" [Johnston, p. 21].) The Illinois example comes from Smith et al., 1998; the New Jersey quotation from Glovin, 1998; the North Carolina quotation from Simmons, 1997; the Maryland example from Goldstein, 1990a; and the New York example from Hartocollis, 1999.
59. Calkins et al., pp. 2, 73.
60. For example, see Mathews, 1998a.
62. This finding by Susan Stodolsky is cited in Noble and Smith, 1994.
63. Zemelman et al., 1998, p. 218.
64. Cenziper, 1998, p. 1C. "About half [of the teachers surveyed] said they spent more than 40 percent of their time having students practice for end-of-grade tests. Almost 70 percent thought the [tests] would not improve education at their schools" and "almost half the teachers surveyed in the UNC study said preparation for the tests has decreased students' love of learning." A press re-lease about the study revealed that two thirds of teachers have changed their teaching strategies to prepare students for the tests, with many relying more on worksheets, lectures, and tests in class than they otherwise would.
66. Darling-Hammond's analogy, which originally appeared in a 1989 article in Rethinking Schools, is paraphrased in Calkins et al., p. 44.
68. Principals, politicians, and journalists routinely cite just such a predictable jump in scores as evidence that the desperate efforts to prepare students for those very tests has been successful. For example, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times asserted that a high-stakes testing program in Texas—perhaps the most educationally destructive program in the nation—"has shown signs of dramatic success," meaning that scores on the test itself have risen (Kolker, 1999).
69. The story appears in Calkins et al., p. 47.
70. Kathy Greeley of Graham and Parks School. Personal communication, 1998.
71. National Association for the Education of Young Children, 1987, p. 1. Piaget (p. 74) anticipated this problem decades ago: "The school examination becomes an end in itself because it dominates the teacher's concerns, instead of fostering his natural role as one who stimulates consciences and minds, and he directs all the work of the students toward the artificial result which is success on final tests."
72. Personal communication, 1998.
73. The work of FairTest (see note 1) is relevant here. Recall also that the questions on a norm-referenced test are more likely to be included not only when just some students get them right but when they are answered correctly by those who answer the other questions correctly, too. Thus, "a test item on which African-Americans do particularly well but whites do not is likely to be discarded because of the interaction of two factors: African-Americans are a minority, and African-Americans tend to score low" (Neill and Medina, 1989, p. 692).
74. Virtually no one, including defenders of standardized tests, will deny this fact; it is evident to anyone who visits schools around the country. Those looking for empirical confirmation can find it in Madaus et al., pp. 2, 15–16; and in Herman and Golan, who discovered a particularly striking discrepancy in how much time was spent taking practice tests in poor versus rich schools. In the most extreme cases, such as Baltimore elementary schools serving low-income African-American students, "teachers are now spending the entire school year teaching for the standardized tests." Sadder still, some teachers don't seem to mind: "Their scores went up this last time, so it's worth it," one third-grade teacher remarked (Winerip, 1999, p. 40).
76. Jones is quoted in Cenziper, p. 7C.
5. GETTING SCHOOL REFORM WRONG
1. This distinction grew out of a conversation I had in 1993 with Eric Schaps, who directs the Developmental Studies Center in Oakland, Calif.
2. The original meaning of "standard" is noted in Jervis and McDonald, 1996, p. 568.
3. Eisner, 1995, p. 763. "Uniform standards may be appropriate for business—a manufacturer wants all its microwave ovens to meet specified standards of quality. That's good. But to what extent do we want all students to be alike?" (Reigeluth, 1997, p. 204).
4. "The TIMSS data provide examples of countries with centralized curriculum and educational control that achieve both higher and less high than the US" (Schmidt, in press).
5. Those who do know something about the field may be dismissed rather than consulted. My favorite example of this comes from a state legislator in Montana whose pet proposal was blocked by some of his colleagues who happened to be former teachers and administrators. He remarked, "We screwed up. We just put too many educators on the education committee" (Lindsay, 1995, p. 14).
7. Jones and Whitford, 1997, p. 279.
9. Note the irony here: policy makers not only dictate what and how to teach, but then insist that teachers be held accountable for what they were compelled to do! As one teacher put it, "I have no problem being held accountable for the content and direction of my classroom, but I would ask that this accountability extend only to factors within my control" (Smith, 1999).
10. "Stating precise and definite curricular objectives in advance of any educational activity ... is, of course, an argument by analogy from the world of manufacture where, at least, according to Taylor, precise specifications and standards had to be established in advance in order to achieve the desired product with maximum efficiency" (Herbert M. Kliebard, quoted in Wolk, 1998, p. 33). Ironically, Taylor's assembly line paradigm continues to drive the corporate view of educational standards even though many corporations no longer see it as useful in the business world.
11. We ought to rethink the idea that accountability means "to an external authority." At the least, we ought to demand broader, more meaningful measures of success. Purely "statistical accountability, with the abstraction of student performance into numbers without context, removes classroom practices from the discussion of educational reform" and fails to "encourage deeper discussion of educational problems" (Dorn, 1998, pp. 23, 22). In smaller schools that are more democratic, Deborah Meier argues, "the accountability we owe to parents and the public is a matter of access, not of complex governing bodies or monitoring arrangements. In small schools we know quickly which teachers are absent, and don't need to depend on time clocks." In large schools, by contrast, "administrators can be held accountable only for indirect indicators of performance because that's all they know—'standardized' stuff, easily manipulated and inauthentic" (Meier, 1995b, pp. 112–13). Beyond the specific point Meier is making here, her style of criticism is worth noticing: rather than just calling for more or less accountability, she questions the usual definition and invites us to see how our positions are effectively constrained by the features of schooling (in this case, the sheer size of schools) that we take for granted. This sort of analysis contrasts sharply with talking about how high, how much, how fast, how hard.
12. Deci et al., 1982. This phenomenon has been noticed by a number of educators, including Seymour Sarason and Linda McNeil. Once again, though, Dewey (1916, p. 109) anticipated long ago what researchers would later discover. Often, he remarked, "the intelligence of the teacher is not free; it is confined to receiving the aims laid down from above.... This distrust of the teacher's experience is then reflected in lack of confidence in the responses of pupils."
13. See Kanter, 1977, pp. 189–90.
14. The mother of an honor roll student in Alabama who was denied a high school diploma because he failed that state's graduation test says that she "might as well have told him to skip school, fail his classes, and get into trouble because nothing matters except the almighty exit exam." (From an unpublished letter sent to an administrator in Baldwin County; her name has been withheld on request.)
15. See Olson, 1998, for an example of this way of framing the debate.
16. For more than you could ever want to read on the issues raised in the next few paragraphs, see Kohn, 1993a.
17. Harackiewicz et al., 1984, p. 293.
18. Shepard, p. 8. Those gains from teaching to the test may not last very long.
19. There is evidence that retention "increases dramatically in historically low-achieving schools following the implementation of a statewide high-stakes assessment," a practice that two researchers describe as "egregiously unethical"—to say nothing of the fact that it tends to "contaminate accountability data" (McGill-Franzen and Allington, 1993, pp. 20–21).
20. Berliner and Biddle, pp. 192–92.
21. Steve Frommeyer is quoted in Keller, 1998, p. 16.
22. Kellaghan et al., 1996, p. 23.
23. "Contrary to the popular view, dropouts are not always the worst students. According to one estimate, nearly 30 percent of all dropouts in America would test out as gifted" (Covington, 1992, p. 59).
24. Darling-Hammond, 1997, p. 238.
25. A review of scores by FairTest found that "students were less likely to reach a level of "proficient" or higher on the NAEP math or reading tests in states which had mandatory high school graduation tests" ("High-Stakes Tests," 1997–98, p. 1). Bracey (1998a) then looked for changes in students' status on these tests from 1990 to 1996 and drew the conclusion quoted here.
26. See Kellaghan et al., 1996. For additional evidence about the British experience with high-stakes exams, see Freedman, 1995.
27. The superintendent, John A. Murphy, is quoted in Goldstein, 1990b. He went on to say, "If it can be taught, it can be measured."
1. This is confirmed by the AFT's "Making Standards Matter" report, which deserves credit at least for recommending that low-achieving students be provided with extra help.
3. Labaree, 1997b, pp. 72, 51. Another group of writers made much the same point: "The result of strictly meritocratic reforms will not be a better future for the majority, but new convenience in designating the victims of both educational and economic deprivation. Today's get-tough policies work, in practice, as new ways to justify the enlargement of an underclass and the lowering of expectations for most others.... In too many cases, excellence has become a code word for retrenchment in public education, signaling a retreat from egalitarian commitments and from public responsibility in schooling" (Bastían et al., 1986, pp. 55–6, 4).
4. This quotation, from page iii of Hard Work and High Expectations: Motivating Students to Learn, released by the U.S. Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), is cited in Kellaghan et al., 1996, p. 1.
6. Wood, 1992, p. xxii. This conclusion is consistent with the research conducted by the educational historian Larry Cuban (1988, pp. 342–43), who found that recent reforms "seek to make the existing system more productive, not to disturb basic classroom roles or the governance structure of schools." More serious proposals to change the traditional nature of education "have seldom found a permanent home in the classrooms and schools of the nation"—as we saw in chapter 1.
7. Wood, p. 10. Also see Sizer, 1992, p. 11: "'Tougher' courses often simply meant 'more' to cover, maintaining the 'exposure' metaphor and further trivializing a grotesquely overloaded curriculum. 'More homework' usually meant more mindless busy work. A longer school year or school day translated into more of the existing regimen."
8. "Evidence indicating that, when districts or states that represent the full panoply of American students and schools set high standards, they also generate greater levels of achievement ... has not yet appeared, nor is it likely that we will ever see it" (Biddle, 1997, p. 10).
10. For math in particular, researchers have found "a significant positive linear relationship between observed 'engaged time' of the learner in low-level mathematics activities and tasks (knowledge, facts, and skill) and students' subsequent low-level mathematics achievement." But that clear relationship isn't apparent "for higher level mathematics activities, including mathematical applications and problem solving" (Putnam et al., 1990, p. 129).
11. Moving to fewer classes that last longer is usually referred to as "block scheduling." It has been enthusiastically supported by a number of educators (e.g., Queen and Gaskey, 1997) but hasn't always led to better results when teaching methods haven't changed along with the schedule (see Sommerfeld, 1996). The power of this reform, though, is that with proper support and coaching, high school teachers often find that a much longer period of time with a class is an invitation to rethink the traditional, lecture-based way of teaching. The added time thus acts as a catalyst for improvement rather than itself being the source of achievement gains.
12. "We are intent on improving academic performance," said the superintendent of schools in Atlanta, and "you don't do that by having kids hanging on the monkey bars" (quoted in Johnson, 1998, p. Al).
14. Schmidt et al., in press. Surveys that report U.S. students don't spend as many days in school as some of their counterparts in other countries generally fail to measure actual hours of instruction. For example, Japanese, Korean, and Canadian students spend more days in school than those in the U.S. but have fewer actual hours of instruction. (See National Center for Education Statistics, 1994.)
15. Martin Burne, the principal of Deerfield Elementary School in Milburn, N.J., is quoted in Winerip, 1999, p. 28. The writer of this article goes on to observe that "there are many ways to measure a successful school—the creativity of the students, their happiness, their hunger to learn new things, their love of reading. But at this point in American history, the most important measure ... is performance on standardized tests. And as long as that is true, those backpacks are likely to be full each night starting in grade 1 and maybe earlier" (p. 40).
18. Cooper et al., 1998. The quotation appears on p. 81.
19. Black, 1996. Fortunately, some teachers assign homework only when there is something important to do that can't be done in school, such as conducting a scientific investigation at home. Some teachers figure that homework is far more likely to be useful if students have been brought in on the process of deciding what ought to be done, by what date, in what manner, and for what purpose. In Japan, meanwhile, homework for older students doesn't consist of the dreaded (and often pointless) teacher-directed assignment, such as "read chapter 12 and do the even-numbered questions"; rather, there is the expectation that students will spend time "reviewing the day's lessons and anticipating the lessons for the following day" (Stevenson, 1998, p. 529). In Japanese eighth-grade math classes, homework is rarely assigned at all (Stigler and Hiebert, 1997, p. 18).
20. For another thoughtful critique, see Corno, 1996. Others who have challenged conventional ways of thinking about the subject include Etta Kralovec, who teaches at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Me., and Patricia Hinchey, who teaches at the Pennsylvania State University. Cooper's research was featured in a Newsweek article that also quoted Corno's conclusion: "Homework is more a part of the problem than a part of the solution" (see Begley, 1998; the quotation appears on p. 51).
21. Retention can also be a deliberate strategy to boost a school's overall test scores (see p. 99). Thus, one part of the Tougher Standards agenda (preventing low-achieving students from advancing to the next grade) is encouraged by the adoption of another part (high-stakes testing).
22. See Labaree, chap. 2. The irony here is that it is traditionalists who are fond of accusing progressives of being driven by ideology and political considerations.
24. House, 1989, pp. 204–5, 215; Shepard and Smith, 1989, p. 10. Investigations by other researchers, including a study of young children in Washington, D.C. (see Marcon, 1994), has confirmed these conclusions. Also see Reynolds et al., 1997; Darling-Hammond and Falk, 1997; Owings and Magliaro, 1998; Allington and McGill-Franzen, chap. 2; and, most recently, a report by the National Research Council described in Hauser, 1999.
25. For more on multiage education and looping, see p. 156.
26. Stevenson, p. 526; Lewis, 1995, p. 15. "Asian children are not divided into high- or low-ability groups [so] Asian teachers must therefore present each lesson in a variety of ways for children with different skills" (Chira, 1992).
27. Lewis, p. 15, citing the U.S. Department of Education's report Japanese Education Today.
28. Lewis, pp. 201, 16. The national curriculum standards in Japan are much shorter and less detailed than the model to which many Americans seem to aspire.
29. Lewis, passim; and Baris-Sanders, 1997.
30. Stigler and Stevenson, 1991; Lewis, passim. All of this seems to be turned on its head, with a reversion to teacher-directed, fact-based instruction, when students get to high school (see Paul George's observations, cited in Bracey, 1996b, p. 642; Lewis, p. 198).
31. Lewis and Tsuchida, 1998. Nor can this success be put down to Japan's more homogeneous population. "It is diversity in children's educational backgrounds, not in their social and cultural backgrounds, that poses the greatest problems in teaching. Although the United States is culturally more diverse than Japan or China, we have found no more diversity at the classroom level" in Asia. "Teachers everywhere must deal with students who vary in their knowledge and motivation" and "the variability in levels of academic achievement differs little between the United States and Japan, Taiwan, or China" (Stigler and Stevenson, p. 19).
32. Dewey, 1913, p. 2. Also see his discussion in chapter 3 of Democracy and Education. Psychological research has borne out Dewey's concern: "Simply increasing the pressure on students to try harder in the face of failure is to invite disaster" (Covington, 1992, p. 78).
33. Marianne Moody Jennings, quoted in Bryant, 1998.
34. Marshall, 1994, p. 43. Emphasis added.
35. Flink et al., 1992, p. 208. In fact, rewards are more likely to undermine interest, but they can increase the probability that someone will do the work, like it or not, at least temporarily.
36. Some high school and college instructors deliberately make their courses very difficult, particularly at the beginning of the year. They may do this because, by some macho calculus, they think a tougher course is a better course. Even more disturbingly, they may be deliberately trying to force out students who can't handle the challenge or the pressure or who don't want to devote most of their time to this particular course. This is especially pervasive among science teachers, but the fundamentally antidemocratic sensibility it suggests isn't all that different from that of a teacher in the arts whose professional pride is invested in the occasional student who becomes famous. In both cases, the point is not to help most students cultivate a love of, and competence in, the field; the point is to sift through most students, even weed them out, in search of the very few who can triumph.
38. See Danner and Lonky, 1981. For evidence that the chance to choose increases people's willingness to risk failure, see Kuhl and Blankenship, 1979. That a performance-oriented environment (and especially one that involves competition) can reduce this natural desire to challenge oneself was discussed in chapter 2; also see Nicholls, 1989, chap. 7. Danner and Lonky's study makes it clear that offering rewards, including praise, for success similarly induces children to pick tasks they can do easily (so that they'll receive the reward) instead of tasks that provide an optimal level of challenge. Of course, if students spend most of their time in environments featuring rewards, competition, and the pressure to perform well, their logical preference for easier tasks may be misinterpreted as laziness, or as a reflection of "human nature." These conclusions may then convince a teacher or parent to reduce children's chance to choose or to increase the use of rewards—which is precisely what caused the problem in the first place.
40. Meier, 1995a, p. 373. See also Meier, 1995b, p. 183; Meier and Kohn, 1998.
41. "Many Fail New Nevada Tests," 1998; Barnett, 1997; Walsh, 1997.
42. Personal communication with Deborah Meier, 1997. A similar point was made by Allington and McGill-Franzen, 1995, p. 50.
43. A new test for teachers in Massachusetts asks them to define the word "preposition." As a writer and former English teacher, I don't know that I could produce an abstract definition of the term, but I do know that neither role requires me to be able to do so. True to form, low scores on the test led politicians, businesspeople, and newspaper editorial writers to denounce the ignorance of teachers—but not to inquire whether the content of the test made any sense.
7. STARTING FROM SCRATCH
1. Noddings, 1992, pp. 12, 174. She adds that "moral purposes have, until recently, been more important than academic ones" in U.S. schools (pp. 64–65), although the traditional "moral" purposes were often quite different than those she endorses. Even today, "71 percent of Americans believe it is more important to teach values than academics," according to a survey by the Public Agenda Foundation (cited in Wagner, 1998, p. 514).
3. Reynolds and Martin, 1996, p. 19.
4. The first quotation is from Gardner, 1991, p. 128; the second, from Resnick, 1987, p. 5.
5. Nicholls and Hazzard, 1993, p. 91.
6. Katz and Chard, 1989, p. 21. "As children grow older," Katz (1998, p. 34) added, "it is the responsibility of schools to help them make better, fuller, and deeper sense of other people's experiences and environments" rather than of just their own.
7. Daniel Resnick is paraphrased in Gursky, 1991, p. 28.
9. Piaget is quoted in Sherry, 1976.
10. Wilson is quoted in Lapham, 1991, p. 10.
12. Brooks and Brooks (1993, p. 9) contrast this remark of Dewey's with one by Franklin Bobbitt (an early proponent of applying factory-style scientific management to schools): "Education is primarily for adult life, not for child life." The latter view still seems to be implicit in contemporary business prescriptions for school reform, which see schooling as an "investment" and students as future workers (see Kohn, 1997a).
14. This model was articulated most famously by one Elwood Cubberly in 1916: "Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils to the specifications laid down" (quoted in Gelberg, 1997, p. 27). On this factory model, and on the training of students to take their place as workers, also see Darling-Hammond, 1997, pp. 39–47; Bowles and Gintis, 1976. Ted Sizer (1984, p. 88) suggests that compulsory school attendance may have had another economic motive: a simple desire to protect adults' jobs.
18. The quotations are from Labaree 1997a, p. 38; and 1997b, pp. 258 and 32, respectively. Labaree goes on to argue that one consequence of viewing education this way is that the quality of learning itself is likely to decline. "We have credentialism to thank for the aversion to learning that, to a great extent, lies at the heart of our educational system," he observes. The point is not to get an education but to get ahead—and therefore, from the student-consumer's point of view, "to gain the highest grade with the minimum amount of learning" (1997b, p. 259). This perspective was borne out by a college instructor who offered familiar complaints about his students' ignorance of history and current events but then, rather than attributing it to low standards, insufficient homework, laziness, television, or other commonly cited causes, noted that the students "said they wouldn't need the information in their future jobs.... 'When is any of this stuff going to matter in my career?'" asked one student (Craig, 1997). This attitude may be nothing more than the logical result of all the talk by businesspeople and politicians about education's primary role as preparing students for the workplace.
19. It's also possible that the private and public goals are held by different people. Educators and policymakers may think in terms of what we need schools to do for our economic (or political) system, whereas a parent may be more concerned about what school can do (materially or otherwise) for his or her own child. If this is true, then it isn't altogether accurate to describe what's going on as a situation where "we" have to choose between this or that educational objective so much as a situation where the more accurate question is: Who gets to choose? (Of course, even if everyone in the country agreed that education should be viewed primarily as a means for maximizing the competitive advantage of one's own child, that goal in itself guarantees conflict because each child has to triumph over all the others.)
21. Tony Wagner, now at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
22. See Daniels, 1996; Daniels, 1993, p. 7; and Zemelman et al., 1998, pp. 263–65.
23. "Teachers often described factors within the student or within the home that might be contributing to these problematic behaviors.... Rarely was the classroom environment mentioned as a possible contributor to the use of these troubling strategies" (Urdan et al., 1998, p. 115).
24. "Given particular outer conditions and approaches to education, an inner world will eventually emerge which conforms to and matches it," as one group of researchers (Ryan et al., 1992, p. 168) put it. For substantiation of how school culture significantly shapes students' motivational orientation, see Maehr and Midgley, 1996, esp. chap. 4.
25. In a recent book concerned with "teaching for understanding," for example, the emphasis is on using meaningful assessments in place of standardized tests, giving students a more active role in that process, and facilitating the construction of meaning rather than trying to transmit facts and skills. All of this is to the good. Somewhat troubling, however, is the implicit assumption that there is no such thing as too much assessment or too much attention to performance: we're told that "assessments occur frequently, from the beginning of a curriculum sequence until the end. Specific assessment activities are conducted in conjunction with every significant performance of understanding." Indeed, "one is continually comparing one's present performance with where one was earlier and where one wants to be" (Wiske, 1998, pp. 80, 77). The general sensibility of this project may be progressive and the specific form of the assessments irreproachable, but one senses a hidden similarity with a traditional, Tougher Standards approach to school reform in that both fail to distinguish between a performance orientation and a learning orientation, thereby overlooking the potential harms of the former.
26. Meier is quoted in Scherer, 1994, p. 7.
27. For evidence of the decline, see Harter, 1992; Harter and Jackson, 1992 (for a replication); Anderman and Young, 1994 (for evidence that it happens in science); and Lepper et al., 1997 (for still further confirmation).
28. For more on this topic, see Kohn, 1993a.
30. One researcher did just this at a traditional school and found that "most students would tell me the textbook chapter title, and, if I inquired further, the exercise number. It was generally very difficult to obtain any further information." At a progressive school, by contrast, "students would describe the problem they were trying to solve, what they had discovered so far, and what they were going to try next" (Boaler, 1998, p. 50).
32. Similarly, "inadequate achievement is merely a symptom" of motivational problems (Covington, p. 158).
33. Beyond the implicit repudiation of other possible reasons (such as fostering a continuing motivation to learn, helping children to grow into good people, or creating a more democratic society, to name three), the single-minded pursuit of "academic performance" seems in context to refer not to intellectual sophistication but simply to higher standardized test scores ("Text of Policy Statement," 1996). Even apart from political documents like that one, it has been observed that "the study of human motivation has not played a major role in either the study of school reform, or the development of school reform programs and policies" (Anderman, 1997, p. 329). And when people do talk about motivation, it is "too often equated with quantitative changes in behavior (e.g., higher achievement, more time on task) rather than qualitative changes in the ways students view themselves in relation to the task, engage in the process of learning, and then respond to the learning activities and situation" (Ames, 1992a, p. 268).
34. This is not to deny that interest can also follow from competence: under some circumstances, "we get interested in what we get good at" (Bruner, 1966, p. 118). The relationship may well be reciprocal, with one leading to the other, which then enhances the first. But I believe the phenomenon deserving of more attention, and typically receiving much less, is how interest drives competence.
35. Farnham-Diggory, 1990, pp. 93–94.
37. For example, see Pintrich and De Groot, 1990.
38. Of course, this supports the last chapter's argument that we put far too much emphasis on whether the assignments given to students are hard enough and too little emphasis on whether students regard these assignments as worth doing. Among the many studies on the relevance of interest level to reading recall and comprehension: Anderson et al., 1987; Asher, 1979; Ryan et al., 1990; and Schiefele, 1996.
39. The same is true for teachers. If the curriculum "cannot change, move, perturb, inform teachers, it will have no effect on those whom they teach," remarked Jerome Bruner (1977, p. xv).
40. Newmann, 1992c, p. 2. He continues: "Until we learn more about the fundamental problem of how to engage students in schoolwork, there is no reason to expect improvements in achievement" (pp. 3–4).
41. Dewey, 1916, pp. 186, 213.
42. Alexander et al., 1994, p. 218.
43. As William Kilpatrick (1918, pp. 328–29) put it, "We contemplate no scheme of subordination of teacher or school to childish whim.... It is the special duty and opportunity of the teacher to guide the pupil through his present interests and achievement into the wider interests and achievement demanded by the wider social life of the older world." Likewise Bruner (1966, p. 161): "To personalize knowledge one does not simply link it to the familiar. Rather one makes the familiar an instance of a more general case and thereby produces awareness of it."
44. I've made the argument against the nomenclature of "work" in Kohn, 1997b, and in so doing have drawn from the thinking of Hermine H. Marshall (e.g., 1990/1997, 1994).
8. EDUCATION AT ITS BEST
2. Dewey, 1900/1990, p. 130. Similar comments are woven through virtually all of Dewey's books.
3. For example, see Kohlberg and Mayer, 1972, which explicitly distinguishes the Romantic views of Jean-Jacques Rousseau from the progressive approach of Dewey and Piaget. (It's become almost de rigueur for conservatives to invoke Rousseau's name and pin it on those who disagree with them.)
4. Constructivism is primarily a philosophical position (see note 7); its relevance to education is derived mostly from the explorations of child development by Jean Piaget, who only began to use the word "constructivism" toward the end of his life. His work was systematically applied to the classroom beginning in the 1970s by Rheta DeVries and Constance Kamii, among others. Today there are numerous books on the subject for educators, including Brooks and Brooks, 1993; Fosnot, 1996; and Marlowe and Page, 1998.
5. Whitehead, 1929/1967, pp. 30, v.
6. This contradicts the behaviorists' assumption that students must be prodded with artificial inducements, such as "positive reinforcement" for learning. When such devices do appear to be necessary, it is not a statement about children or human psychology but about what is being taught and how.
7. Constructivism calls into question not only traditional ideas of knowing and learning but our understanding of knowledge itself—specifically, the idea that the world to be known is "out there," independent of people, waiting to be taken in. Constructivists argue that reality, including scientific phenomena, are construed and ultimately constituted by us as much as observed. Galileo may have "collected measurements of falling objects"; however, the idea of acceleration "did not emerge in a nonproblematic way from observations but was imposed upon them." Science, like history, literature, and other fields, is not the story of the world impinging on us but of "constructs that have been invented and imposed on phenomena in attempts to interpret and explain them, often as results of considerable intellectual struggles" (Driver et al., 1994, p. 6). A milder form of this argument is more epistemological than ontological: it doesn't deny the independent existence of reality but holds that "the only thing we can know is our own understanding of [that reality]—our own construction of it" (Zahorik, 1997, p. 30). Such arguments are obviously complicated and controversial, and it's impossible to do justice to them here. For a good overview of constructivism, and its implications for philosophy, psychiatry, mathematics, sociology, and other disciplines, see Watzlawick, 1984.
8. Putnam et al., 1990, p. 89. Resnick and Klopfer (1989, pp. 3–4) make the same observation; also see Battista, 1999, p. 432. The only real exceptions are orthodox behaviorists, whose numbers are dwindling.
9. Not everyone agrees with this. Writers like E.D. Hirsch, Jr. (1996, p. 134), forced to concede that traditional descriptions of how people learn are seriously misconceived, fall back on the claim that no prescriptions for schools are entailed by the new theory. Because everybody always constructs knowledge, "there is no necessary relation between the mode of instruction offered by the teacher and the amount of active meaning construction engaged in by the student." It's a clever argument, but I believe it's wrong, for the reasons indicated in the text. If knowledge is actively constructed by the learner rather than simply transmitted to the learner, then "one cannot assume that what is presented through curriculum or instruction is what students will learn. Instruction can no longer be viewed as a matter of simply laying out, however carefully, the knowledge and skill to be acquired" (Putnam et al., p. 92). A lot will therefore turn on the kind of teaching that takes place.
When asked, Lauren Resnick (personal communication, 1998) explicitly says she disagrees with Hirsch's contention that constructivism doesn't yield prescriptions for instruction, and further argues that the prescriptions it does yield "aren't his." Another group of researchers, meanwhile, acknowledge that constructivism is technically a "descriptive theory of learning" but add that this doesn't deny that there are "several principles for practice that would seem to facilitate the learning process" that constructivism describes. The four principles they list are incorporated in what follows in the text: the teacher should attend to students' prior knowledge, "emphasize opportunities for higher-order thinking and in-depth understanding," offer multiple opportunities to process information, and act as a "coach, facilitator, guide, or mentor in a 'cognitive apprenticeship'" (Newmann et al., 1996, p. 285).
10. The teacher is Anne Hendry, and her account, originally published elsewhere, was excerpted in Schifter, 1996, pp. 73–76.
12. Edwards, 1993, p. 157. The essay in which this comment appears is a wonderful discussion of the role of the constructivist teacher.
14. For a description of a college-level physics course where the instructor plays a role very similar to that of the first-grade teacher, see Dykstra, 1996.
15. The term "scaffolding" was first used in this context by Jerome Bruner, and it derives from the work of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (e.g., 1978), who wrote during the first third of the twentieth century. His emphasis on the social nature of learning usefully supplements the work of Piaget. Some constructivists have challenged the metaphor of scaffolding, however: see Fosnot, 1996, p. 21; Fyfe, 1997, pp. 5–6.
16. The importance of resisting the desire for closure is a point made by Eleanor Duckworth and also by Deborah Meier. Meier has other thoughts on what defines good teachers: they are reflective about how they themselves learn (and don't learn); enjoy working collaboratively; want to share their interests with others; are committed to getting things right; and have "a sympathy toward others, an appreciation of differences, [and] an ability to imagine [their] own 'otherness'" (Meier, 1995b, p. 142). That last characteristic suggests the capacity to see oneself as one is seen by others, which is one more facet of taking the student's point of view.
17. Michael Marland is quoted in Green and Myers, 1990, p. 330.
18. That the teaching style is related to the type of knowledge involved is a point made by DeVries, 1997, p. 15; and DeVries and Zan, 1994, pp. 193–97, drawing from Piaget's distinction between conventional, physical, and logico-mathematical knowledge.
19. One additional feature of the task might also be relevant. There is some evidence that reading and thinking skills, as opposed to that which is being read and thought about, can be taught directly. Teachers might help students learn and apply very specific techniques such as silently summarizing what they've just read, anticipating what's coming next in the book, or making up relevant questions and figuring out what information they'd need to answer them. Ann Brown and her colleagues have done some interesting work with such instructional techniques and have argued that "the more complex the strategy in question, the more explicit the instruction needed" (Campione et al., 1988, p. 99; for a review of related research, see Fielding and Pearson, 1994). These methods can be "transmitted," but ideally they will then be used by students who spend most of the day constructing rather than absorbing. Moreover, the disposition to use the skills in question may count for at least as much as the skills themselves.
22. The balance between students' understandings and "experts' constructions" is discussed in Zahorik, 1997.
25. Carol Miller's account appears in Wilson, 1993, pp. 97–98.
26. This idea is attributed by Bruner (1966, p. 4) to someone named David Page.
27. The teacher, Peg Gerhart, is quoted in Routman, 1991, p. 131.
29. Katz and Chard, 1989, p. 44.
30. Dewey (1952, p. 130) had the same concern: "In the secondary schools and colleges ... the conditions still too largely prevailing in the school—the size of the classes, the load of work, and so on—make it difficult to carry on the educative process in any genuinely cooperative democratic way."
31. Meier, 1995b, pp. 41, 49–50.
32. Recalling a friend who "gave up teaching high school mathematics because she could not answer, to her own satisfaction, the students who asked, 'Why do we gotta do this stuff?'" John Nicholls reflects that "much of what we teach is hard to justify, and we might expose ourselves to the challenge of justifying it to our students and changing it when reason demands this.... If adults spent more energy provoking children to think about what knowledge is worthwhile and less energy trying to hold their noses to the grindstones assigned by test and textbook selection committees, everyone might have more energy" (Nicholls and Hazzard, 1993, pp. 183–84).
33. See Sizer, 1992, pp. 76–77. In an earlier book, Sizer quoted Whitehead (1929/1967, p. 2), who maintained that the prescription for guarding against "mental dryrot" is to observe "two educational commandments. 'Do not teach too many subjects,' and again, 'What you teach, teach thoroughly.'"
34. This is true, for example, in the world-famous Italian model of early childhood education known as the Reggio Emilia approach, where "young children are not marched or hurried sequentially from one different activity to the next, but instead encouraged to repeat key experiences, observe and reobserve, consider and reconsider, represent and rerepresent" (Edwards et al., 1993, p. 7).
35. Gardner made these comments during an address at the annual convention of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, Milwaukee, October 1997. He has written that we should "involve students as deeply as possible in the central problems of a discipline, so that they can acquire a fully rounded view of the data and the evidence. A month or even an entire term devoted to a particular topic proves effective" (1991, p. 237).
38. The example is from Gerhard Salinger, a program director at the National Science Foundation, quoted in Willis, 1995a, p. 8.
39. Bruner (1960, pp. 21–22) describes how a sixth-grade class given this assignment "rapidly produced a variety of plausible theories concerning the requirements of a city—a water transportation theory that placed Chicago at the junction of the three lakes, a mineral resources theory that placed it near the Mesabi range, a food-supply theory that put a great city on the rich soil of Iowa, and so on. The level of interest as well as the level of conceptual sophistication was far above that of [traditionally taught] classes. Most striking, however, was the attitude of children to whom, for the first time, the location of a city appeared as a problem, and one to which an answer could be discovered by taking thought."
40. Betsy Rupp Fulwiler, a teacher at the John Rogers School, borrowed this activity from an approach to teaching social studies called Storypath, developed by Margit McGuire at Seattle University. See McGuire, 1997.
41. The Brown-Barge Middle School in Pensacola.
42. Katz, 1998, p. 35; also see Katz and Chard, p. 4. The reductio ad absurdum of vertical relevance is to make decisions about school curriculum and children's lives primarily on the basis of what will maximize their chances of getting into the best college. "We must be guided by the present lives of children, not by the shadow of the college admissions officer lurking in the corner," says Susan Ohanian (1996b, p. 279).
43. The answer can be put in question form, but the learning is still in jeopardy. The comment in the text was offered by John Holt (p. 199), who continued: "The only answer that really sticks in a child's mind is the answer to a question that he asked or might ask of himself."
44. John Furey, at the Rand School in Montclair, N.J.
45. The Francis Parker School.
46. Anne Davis at the Drew Model School in Arlington, Va.
47. For discussions of the criteria for good questions, see Perkins, 1992, pp. 92–95; Perrone, 1994; and especially Traver, 1998.
48. The Founding Fathers question, posed by the historian Bernard Bailyn, is cited in Gardner, 1991, p. 238; the hand question comes from Bruner, 1966, p. 98.
49. Kilpatrick, 1918, pp. 320–21.
50. Wolk, 1994, pp. 43–44. At the time, he was teaching at the Baker Demonstration School in Evanston, 111. For a more comprehensive account of project-based learning, see chapter 6 in his subsequent book: Wolk, 1998. (Among other things, he describes how he, the teacher, chooses and carries out a project and then makes a presentation just as the students do [pp. 122–23].) In a discussion of project-based learning from the perspective of researchers concerned about student motivation, Blumenfeld et al. (1991) warn that even willing and competent students may not pursue the project "in a manner that promotes understanding" if the teacher "emphasize[s] grades and comparative performance, discourage [s] risk-taking, use[s] evaluation criteria that stress right answers, enforce[s] accountability for work by imposing externally controlling events such as rewards and punishments, or assign[s] primarily low-level tasks" (p. 380).
51. The Autodesk Foundation is located at 111 McInnis Parkway, San Rafael, CA 94903, and at www.autodesk.com/foundation.
54. This example of problem-based learning appears in Checkley, 1997b, p. 4. For a more comprehensive treatment of the idea that contains many more examples, see Delisle, 1997.
55. There are various models of cooperative learning, which is to say, various ways of structuring a classroom so that students can meet in pairs or small groups to learn together. The version most consistent with constructivism is Group Investigation, developed by a group of Israeli educators: Shlomo Sharan, Yael Sharan, and Rachel Hertz-Lazarowitz. Here, students break a subject into specific questions, sort themselves into groups to explore those questions, plan and conduct an investigation, and figure out how to share what they have learned with the rest of the class. (See Sharan and Sharan, 1992.)
56. Making sure that there is an audience (beyond the teacher) for students' projects is a core principle of the kind of teaching supported by the Foxfire Network, which grew out of Eliot Wigginton's work in rural Georgia. (See, for example, Smith, 1994—or contact the Foxfire Fund, P.O. Box 541, Mountain City, GA 30562.)
58. I scarcely need to mention the inadequacy of contrived and superficial connections between separated disciplines, such as inserting Chinese names into otherwise unrelated math word problems when students are being taught about China during social studies.
59. "The reason school needs to integrate curriculum is because it falsely separated it from the start. But with projects, we start with the whole. Therefore, there's nothing to integrate. When doing projects, the integration of multiple disciplines occurs naturally, just like it does in real life. There are no 'subjects' in life" (Wolk, 1998, p. 102).
60. Noddings, 1992, p. 172. See especially the work of James Beane (e.g., 1997) on the topic of "curriculum integration."
61. The Westminster West Community School in Westminster, Vt. The account that follows is adapted from Watts, 1994, p. 146.
62. This approach to curriculum design is described in Beane, 1997, esp. pp. 50–62; the quotation appears on p. 18. It has been used at the Marquette Middle School in Madison, Wise., among other places.
64. For example, see Silberman, 1970; Goodlad, 1984; McNeil, 1986; and the data cited in chapter 1 concerning the continued pervasiveness of traditional schooling. As students grow older and feel even more acutely the need to participate in making decisions, they have less opportunity to do so. Whatever openness may have existed in the early grades gives way to an increasingly controlled environment. By the time they get to college, students find themselves in a state of enforced passivity in the classroom; they're handed a preset syllabus and spend class time listening to lectures. A report released in 1998 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, entitled "Reinventing Undergraduate Education," recommended, among other things, that "the freshman program should be carefully constructed as an integrated, interdisciplinary, inquiry-based experience." Shirley Strum, chair of the commission that produced the report, remarked, "What we need to do is to create a culture of inquirers, rather than a culture of receivers" (quoted in Arenson, 1998; the report itself is available on the Web at www.sunysb.edu/boyerreport).
65. The Taming of the Shrew, Act I, Scene 1.
66. The last of these—inviting students to think about why they are learning—was emphasized by Dewey (1938, p. 67). He talked about "the importance of the participation of the learner in the formation of the purposes which direct his activities in the learning process."
67. I have discussed some specific ways of involving students in curricular decisions, as well as some limits on and barriers to this process, in Kohn, 1993b.
68. Joette Weber is quoted in Wood, 1992, p. 5.
69. Matias Jasin at the Hockaday School in Dallas.
70. A version of this technique, called K-W-L, was first described in Ogle, 1986. It's useful to give students time to reflect on each of these questions, perhaps inviting them to take an evening to consider what they'd like to know about a given topic or having them discuss some possibilities with a peer or read a little bit about the topic first. After all, we want their questions to be genuine rather than perfunctory.
71. Lessons are far more effective when they are introduced properly, when the reason for learning them is clear, and when students can participate in making decisions about process and content. Subsequent reflection about what questions were answered, what questions remain, what new questions were generated—as well as how the next unit can be even better—is also critical for learning. "We don't learn from our mistakes; we learn from thinking about our mistakes," said Ralph Tyler—a comment Catherine Lewis (1995, p. 212) quotes in the context of describing the depth of reflection in Japanese classrooms. Alas, these critical steps that precede and follow each unit are most likely to be sacrificed when there is pressure to cover a large quantity of material.
72. The last, most sophisticated question appears in Wiske, 1994, p. 20.
73. Terry Anderson's second grade in Robinson Elementary School in Kirkwood, Mo.
74. For example, see the work by Roy Pea and others on the idea of "distributed intelligence."
75. Resnick and Klopfer, 1989, p. 8.
76. For example, see Yackel et al., 1991.
77. This is somewhat less true with young children and, in any case, is unlikely to happen at the beginning of the year. It takes talent and skill and time for a teacher to empower students in this way.
78. I've summarized some of the theory and research on cooperative learning, providing a number of references to relevant sources, in Kohn, 1992a, chap. 10. Also see Cohen, 1994, for a more scholarly treatment of small group learning. Any survey of the literature must include the work of David and Roger Johnson (e.g., 1994), brothers who teach at the University of Minnesota and cooperate in the study of cooperation. I also recommend Sharan and Sharan, 1992.
79. The research of Noreen Webb (e.g., 1985) has been especially important in demonstrating the cognitive benefits of explaining ideas to others. For evidence that high-ability or high-achieving students tend to benefit from cooperative learning—thus refuting the canard that they gain nothing while teaching their slower peers—see Kohn, 1992a, pp. 51–52; and, more recently, Carter and Jones, 1994.
80. This point has been demonstrated empirically: see Sharan, 1990b, pp. 290–91.
81. This teacher is quoted in Sapon-Shevin and Schniedewind, 1992, p. 15. Elsewhere, Sapon-Shevin has referred to this as the Hamburger Helper model of cooperative learning.
82. This account of research by Paul Vedder appears in Cohen, 1994, p. 6.
83. See Kohn, 1991; 1992a, pp. 225–26; 1993a, pp. 340–41n44.
84. A number of researchers have found that teachers who do exemplary work in helping students engage deeply with what they are learning are invariably part of collegial communities of educators (see, for example, McLaughlin, 1993; and Newmann, 1992a). Conversely, any number of valuable educational re-forms have failed to take root because of a sense of isolation on the part of teachers (see Fullan, 1982).
85. I've dealt with the importance of caring classroom communities in Kohn, 1996a, chap. 7, but the best source of theory and research on the topic, as well as practical resources for creating and sustaining a sense of community, is the Developmental Studies Center in Oakland, Calif. Among the organization's studies: Battistich et al., 1995 and 1997, which found that the extent to which a school is experienced by students as a caring community is significantly associated with their liking for school and their motivation to learn. The positive effects of community are especially pronounced in schools in low-income areas. Among the group's books and videos: At Home in Our Schools: A Guide to Schoolwide Activities that Build Community; Ways We Want Our Class to Be: Class Meetings that Build Commitment to Kindness and Learning; and Among Friends: Classrooms Where Caring and Learning Prevail. A complete catalogue of materials is available by writing to the DSC, 2000 Embarcadero, Suite 301, Oakland, CA 94606, or calling 800–666-7270.
86. Reviews of recent studies, the most conclusive of which is the so-called STAR project in Tennessee, can be found in Viadero, 1995; Bracey, 1995; Achilles et al., 1997/1998; and, for a description of an update showing that the benefits of small classes continue right through high school graduation, Viadero, 1999. The size of the effect is naturally affected by the difference in the sizes of the classes being compared (40 vs. 15 has more of an impact, as you might predict, than 35 vs. 25), and it also appears that class size makes more of a difference in the younger grades. Two significant caveats to the basic finding: first, you wouldn't expect to see much benefit if teachers were basically hired off the street in a rush to lower the teacher-student ratio; and second, the style of teaching must change to take advantage of the smaller size. If a teacher continues to rely on the transmission model of instruction (and to minimize opportunities for student collaboration), even a tiny class might not produce any advantage. Conversely, some Asian schools manage to promote cooperation and active learning even in very large classes. Smaller classes may be helpful but not absolutely necessary to do much of what is described in this book.
87. See Meier, 1995b and 1996a; Sergiovanni, 1996, chap. 6; and Holt, p. 87. The best, and to my mind, most persuasive case for smaller schools is Meier's book The Power of Their Ideas (1995b), which reflects her firsthand experience in founding and leading such schools.
88. The quotation is from Raywid, 1997/1998, p. 35, who reviews some of that evidence. Also see Berliner and Biddle, 1995, pp. 295–98. One study, by the American Legislative Exchange Council, found that rural schools are unusually successful on conventional academic measures not because of what is delicately referred to as "racial homogeneity" but rather because rural schools are more likely to be small. Schools with fewer than three hundred students fared the best of all (Johnson, 1994).
89. On looping, see Burke, 1996; Jacobson, 1997; and Rasmussen, 1998.
90. On multiage education, see, for example, Katz et al., 1990; Pavan, 1992; Viadero, 1996; and McClellan and Kinsey, 1997. The last of these describes a study finding that children whose classmates were of different ages tended to be more helpful and less aggressive than children in conventional, same-age classrooms.
9. GETTING THE THREE R'S RIGHT
1. The movement is not without persuasive defenders, some of whom are quoted in this chapter, but one can't help noticing that claims about how research supports direct phonics instruction are frequently left unanswered. To be more precise, some teachers have responded by saying, in effect, "Well, I know what works in my classroom" or "I don't trust research anyway." Some theorists, meanwhile, have responded by asserting that Whole Language isn't a technique that can be tested but a worldview—and then launching into a discourse about patriarchal hegemony and liberatory praxis. Some of the leading figures in Whole Language, when questioned about research findings, reply that right-wing activists are behind all opposition to the approach, and let it go at that. Now, I believe there is some validity to each of these responses, but I also view with consternation the failure to give direct and potent answers to reasonable challenges about the empirical base of Whole Language. The impression is sometimes given that there isn't any research to support the practices associated with Whole Language, and this, as we'll see, couldn't be further from the truth.
2. The argument that children's reading scores are miserable because schools have stopped teaching phonics is rather difficult to defend from the outset because, in fact, children's reading scores aren't miserable. See p. 17 for some of the evidence. Also see McQuillan, 1998, chap. 1.
3. Academics can be found taking all possible positions on the question of how children should learn to read. (That conservatives are quick to cite any study that seems to support their cause is ironic, given their penchant for dismissing researchers in education and their work, referring to them derisively as "educationists" or part of what E. D. Hirsch, Jr., calls Thoughtworld.) More to the point, teachers who have adopted a Whole Language approach have done so not because it was rammed down their throats by crusading educational theorists but because the idea seemed appealing and the results have been persuasive. Indeed, Whole Language is notable for being a "bottom-up," grassroots reform, driven by classroom teachers.
4. Goodman is quoted in Steinberg, 1997. It may be possible to find a teacher who doesn't agree with this, who provides inadequate instruction, or who, in any number of other ways, implements a good theory badly. But it would be a mistake to attribute any of these things to Whole Language itself.
5. If your child's school is using a packaged program like Success for All—for a description, see p. 300w53—you should be outraged. Programs like this are typically reserved for low-income, mostly African-American schools, a fact that should outrage all of us.
7. Even traditional phonics teachers may go home and "create much richer literary environments for their own children" than they do with ours (Gallimore and Goldenberg, 1992, p. 204).
8. Sulzby et al., 1993, p. 186. This is true regardless of race or income, the authors point out.
9. Whole Language is sometimes confused with the "whole-word" (or "look-say") approach to reading instruction, which lies behind those deadly "See Dick run. Run, Dick, run" primers lurking in our repressed early memories. From a Whole Language perspective, the difference between phonics and whole-word techniques is insignificant compared to the difference between either of these and an approach based on meaning. One teacher, thinking about various skills-based models, was reminded of Calvin Trillin's comment about fruitcakes: "The worst one isn't that much different from the best one" (Ohanian, 1994, p. 10).
10. Dorothy Strickland (1998) calls this approach "whole-part-whole."
11. From a journal entry by Rita Roth, quoted in Wirth, 1983, p. 142.
12. The approach to reading is also reflected in the children's own comments. When first-graders in a skills-based classroom were asked by a researcher what they could do, they said they could read "words, sentences, and the basal reader." When children in a Whole Language classroom were asked the same question, they replied that they could read books (Manning et al., 1989, p. 10).
13. Some have speculated that this aspect of Whole Language may also help explain the virulent opposition by ultraconservatives.
14. Routman, 1991, p. 26. Thus, it's possible for a teacher to use trade books instead of basal readers but to see the stories as separate from, and coming after, the skills work. "It is not unusual to see classrooms with no basals but where books of literature are read whole class, round-robin style. Seatwork consists of packets of vocabulary words to look up and lots of questions to answer in written form for each chapter. Even though literature is being used, children have few actual choices during reading time" (p. 25). Conversely, even where teachers do end up using basal readers—perhaps because they're required to do so—they can "skip the worksheets and meaningless activities and involve students in authentic responses to literature, including literature discussion groups and author study in connection with basal selections and/or supplemental trade books" (Routman, 1996, p. 126).
15. Weaver et al., 1996, pp. 107, 31.
16. Harste is quoted in Willis, 1995b, p. 2.
17. Thanks to Smokey Daniels for pointing out the fifth variant.
18. Plenty of similar examples, along with the remark about Flesch (attributed to Beverly Regelman), can be found in Weaver et al. At one point, these authors cite a study showing that even using three hundred such rules, fewer than half of a list of 17,000 words would have been spelled correctly (p. 105).
19. The first-grader is quoted in Johnson, 1992.
23. Campione et al., 1988, p. 98. An analogously skewed and sad impression is created by a skills-based focus in teaching math, they add. Of course, we could dismiss this concern by saying that children will be taught later on that reading is about meaning. But an initial skills emphasis has taught children to define reading "as a process of linking sounds to symbols," so when they subsequently encounter unfamiliar words, "they may revert to sounding it out. Unable to integrate the new concept of reading for meaning in a context, they fall back on their old perceptions and phonetic strategies and are no closer to understanding the word" (Noble and Smith, 1994, p. 9).
24. Likewise for writing. "When I started to love writing," one first-grader commented, "is when we stopped copying letters and I got to write everything I know about dolphins" (quoted in an unpublished manuscript by Catherine Lewis, Eric Schaps, and Marilyn Watson, 1994).
25. Patty's experience is related in Watson, 1989, pp. 138–41.
28. For an example, see Matson, 1996.
29. One administrator comments, "When I interview prospective teachers, I always ask them how they teach reading. If a teacher says, 'I use what works, use whatever works,' I quickly show them to the door." After all, workbooks and "trivial questions at the end of chapters" could be said to "work"—at keeping kids "at their seats, silent, and busy. [But] not everything that works is good. Children who become hooked on phonics get a deceptive picture of what reading is. Children who read watered-down texts get used to them. Poor quality texts become the given. Children who must answer endless, inane questions after reading get a dangerous view of response to reading. If 'eclectic' means using phonics kits, flash cards, and laminated fill-in-the-blank passages, alongside a shelf of library books, I'm not interested" (Harwayne, 1994, p. 120).
30. For research on this point, see Dickinson and DiGisi, 1998, p. 24.
31. "I am reminded of a kindergartner who would not show me the sentence he had just written on the computer because not all the words were spelled correctly. I was delighted that he had phonemic awareness and could work independently at the computer. However, even though he was obviously very advanced, instead of being pleased with his accomplishment, he was anxious about bis lack of perfection and felt inadequate. He felt far less satisfaction with his efforts than another child who busily and thoughtfully wrote sentence after sentence in his journal using a less advanced level of invented spelling. All other characteristics of these two 5-year-olds being equal, who is more likely to develop the disposition to be a writer?" (Wakefield, 1997, p. 236).
32. This contrast comes from an unpublished, undated manuscript by Susan Sowers.
35. That includes paying attention to the writer's craft even while reading textbooks or other nonfiction. The quality of writing isn't relevant only to stories and poetry.
38. Sweet and Guthrie, 1996, p. 661.
39. See Kohn, 1993a; McQuillan, 1997.
40. Joan Servis is quoted in Routman, 1996, p. 44.
44. "A year-long intensive study of the teaching and learning that took place in a 10th-grade geometry class ... in a highly regarded suburban school district in upstate New York" produced just such results. While "a classroom observer unfamiliar with mathematics would necessarily give the class high marks," students basically spent the year copying proofs and then doing exercises "designed to indicate mastery of relatively small chunks of subject matter." ("Over the period of a full school year, none of the students in any of the dozen classes we observed worked mathematical tasks that could seriously be called problems.") Indeed, this exemplary teacher, mindful of the standardized test the students would eventually have to take, commented at one point, "You'll have to know all your constructions cold so you don't spend a lot of time thinking about them" (Schoenfeld, 1988, pp. 145–46, 152, 159).
45. The National Research Council is quoted in Battista, 1999, p. 427.
47. Brownell, 1932, p. 10. He added: if arithmetic somehow does become "meaningful, it becomes so in spite of drill" (p. 12).
48. Putnam et al., 1990, p. 85.
49. This real example comes from Paul Cobb by way of Gardner, 1991, p. 164.
50. This example, from Max Wertheimer's Productive Thinking, is cited in Schoenfeld, p. 148.
52. Cited in Schoenfeld, p. 150, among other places. Another example: a startling number of young children taught in traditional classrooms give the answer "36" to the question "There are 26 sheep and 10 goats on a ship. How old is the captain?" (Kamii, 1989, p. 160).
53. Dossey et al., 1988, pp. 67, 54.
54. "Because really bright students generally learn symbolic algorithms quickly, they appear to be doing fine when their performance is measured by standard mathematics tests. But a closer look reveals that they too are being dramatically affected by the mathematics miseducation of traditional curricula [ending up with learning that is] only superficial" (Battista, p. 426).
55. Kamii (e.g., 1994, pp. 43, 46) is especially persuasive on this point.
56. Putnam et al., 1990, p. 96.
58. Kamii, 1985b, p. 3. For examples of fortuitous events that can provide the opportunity for children in first, second, and third grade to think about numerical concepts, see Kamii, 1985b, pp. 123–35; 1989, pp. 91–97; and 1994, pp. 92–98. Like some other constructivists, Kamii also swears by the use of certain games—such as those involving dice or play money—for teaching purposes. All the games in question, however, are competitive, suggesting both a lack of familiarity with cooperative games (where the same numerical skills are often required) and a lack of sensitivity to the social and psychological disadvantages of setting children against one another (see Kohn, 1992a).
59. Joseph Kahne at the University of Illinois, Chicago, makes this point. As a rule, he argues, parents "aren't nervous about Whole Language because they know their kids will be reading; their literacy skills aren't threatened" (personal communication, 1997). However, this may understate the extent to which Whole Language diverges from most people's school experience. One writer notes: "Sadly, many parents don't recall being given the opportunity to read 'real books' in their early elementary classrooms unless (as in my case) it was after all their 'work' was done. Thus, attacks on whole language that focus on literature grow partly from parents' discomfort that their children's school experience isn't like their own" (Brinkley, 1998, p. 59). And this from another writer: "When you take away the two school rituals that parents understand—math facts and spelling quizzes—you scare them to death" (Ohanian, 1996a, p. 9).
60. The washer lesson is described in Brooks and Brooks, 1993, pp. 73–75. The bubblegum lesson was used by Pam Hyde and appears in Zemelman et al., 1998, p. 85. The fraction problem comes from Joy Donlin and is reported in Willis and Checkley, 1996, p. 7. The idea of having students write a textbook is attributed to Bill Elasky by Wood, 1992, p. 140.
62. Piaget, 1948/1973, p. 106.
64. Another, more practical reason for asking this same question about a correct answer is that otherwise children will just assume "How did you get that?" is teacher code for "Nope—try again."
65. Kamii, 1985b, pp. 25, 36. Her constructivist premises have led Kamii to offer only a partial endorsement of the NCTM standards. She argues that, despite their emphasis on a deeper understanding of mathematical truths, the standards still reflect an empirical view that those truths have a reality entirely independent of the knower. Further, while collaboration among students is recommended, Kamii believes the standards fail to reflect a constructivist appreciation for the necessity of understanding through resolving conflict among disparate ideas (see Kamii, 1989, pp. 59–62).
66. This point was made by Brownell, 1928, pp. 199, 208–9, and also by Jean Lave, cited in Brown et al., 1989, p. 36. Unfortunately, students in this situation aren't being appropriately challenged (by the teacher or other students) to rethink and improve their initial ideas, so they probably won't learn as effectively as they would in a nontraditional classroom.
67. Lester, 1996, pp. 146–52. For another teacher's description of how—and how well—this approach works, see Strachota, 1996, chap. 3.
69. Not every math educator agrees that primary-grade children shouldn't be given algorithms at all, but Kamii makes a strong case for this position. Rob Madell (1985, p. 20) similarly recommends that no algorithms be taught until the end of third grade and that no conventional procedures for working with fractions be introduced until sixth grade (even though students will have studied fractions intensively for at least two years before that).
71. "Research has shown, however, that most children think that the 1 in 16 means one, until third or fourth grade" (Kamii, 1989, p. 15). "Even in fourth and fifth grades, only half the students interviewed demonstrated good understanding of the individual digits in two-digit numerals" (Ross, 1989, p. 50).
73. Linda Joseph's account appears in Kamii, 1989, p. 156. A nearly identical piece of testimony from another teacher—"I have been teaching ail this time [fifteen years] and I never knew second-graders knew so much about math"—is quoted in another discussion of what it means to become a constructivist math teacher (Wood et al., 1991, p. 601).
74. Katz, 1993, p. 31. Also see Katz and Chard, 1989, pp. 4–5.
10. THE WAY OUT
1. Dewey, 1916, p. 38. For an example of how school reform must itself by informed by constructivist principles, see Wagner, 1998; Noble and Smith, 1994.
2. Dewey, 1952, pp. 132–33. Progressive principles "have been converted into a fixed subject matter of ready-made rules, to be taught and memorized according to certain standardized procedures and, when occasion arises, to be applied to educational problems externally, the way mustard plasters, for example, are applied" (p. 132).
3. "In the back to basics crusade, reformers urged a set of changes in classrooms that fit relatively well with established practice, which itself was didactic, teacher-centered, and oriented to skills and facts. They presented the reform ideas in practical, easy-to-adopt formats, and blanketed American education relatively effectively. The pedagogy of the reform fit quite nicely with the pedagogy that reformers urged on teachers. [By contrast, nontraditional] curriculum reforms urged a very different sort of instruction that would have required immense changes in teaching. But while these reforms were pedagogically very ambitious, they were much less effective in reaching teachers. Reformers only weakly understood practice and the problems their ideas posed for practitioners" (Cohen and Barnes, 1993a, p. 227).
4. I've discussed some of these issues with special reference to cooperative learning in Kohn, 1992b.
8. Jackson, p. II: 6. See also Cohen, 1990. "The major impediment to improving students' mathematics learning is adults' lack of knowledge—both of mathematics and of research on how students learn mathematics" (Battista, 1999, p. 431). Note that it is a lack of knowledge on the part of parents and policy makers, not only teachers, that helps to explain why students continue to be subjected to ineffective, traditional methods.
9. Wood, 1996, p. 90. Progressive educators and their students already know that "engaging" and "rigorous" can go hand in hand, just as they know that traditional education manages to be simultaneously less rigorous and more disagreeable. A lot of other people, however, may need to be reminded. "Someday," Harvey Daniels sighs, "progressives are going to get smart and start talking about the rigor of whole language, the challenge of critical thinking, the demands of collaborative learning, the requirements of student-directed inquiry, the scrutiny of authentic assessment, and the elevated standards of integrated curriculum." Contrary to the carefully cultivated conventional wisdom, it is the nontraditional educators "who really challenge children" (1995, p. 5; emphasis added).
10. Cohen and Barnes, 1993, p. 245.
12. There is a relationship between knowledge and openness to student participation: the more unfamiliar teachers are with a given topic, the more likely they are to keep a tight grip on what happens in the classroom, presumably because of their insecurity (see Prawat, 1989, p. 322).
13. Ginny Hanley is quoted in Willis and Checkley, p. 4.
15. Sometimes teachers catch themselves at this, however belatedly. One high school English teacher confesses that her "authoritarian practices went unquestioned" for years. She wanted her students "to think for themselves, but only so long as their thinking didn't slow down my predetermined lesson plan or get in the way of my teacher-led activity or argue against my classroom policies" (Coe, 1997, p. 7). Other teachers pride themselves on transforming their instructional practices even when they have actually not come as far as they might like to think. David Cohen (1990), an educational researcher, has brilliantly described one such math teacher. While she had introduced cooperative learning and was teaching "math for understanding," the class was still "conducted in a highly structured and classically teacher-centered fashion." While she was teaching better than before, she still "did not see mathematics as a source of puzzles, as a terrain for argument," but as a series of "fixed truths" that she had to impart to them. (Those of us who try to help teachers change their practice know that one of the most challenging obstacles to reform is the tendency of such teachers to respond to descriptions of constructivist classrooms by saying, rather airily, "Oh, I'm already doing all of that.") For another example, see Campbell, 1996, pp. 466–67; for a case study describing a more successful change in teacher practice (also in mathematics), see Wood et al., 1991.
16. This exchange was reported in White, 1992, p. 55.
17. This idea plays an important role in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Erich Fromm and is the core of Dostoyevsky's classic "Grand Inquisitor" chapter in The Brothers Karamazov.
18. John Holt and Ted Sizer are only two of the more prominent educators who have identified this phenomenon.
19. Bruner, 1966, p. 69. On this point, also see Gardner, 1991, pp. 208–9.
20. This may help to explain the rapid demise of the California Learning Assessment System (CLAS), a major improvement over the conventional standardized tests that preceded and succeeded it (Kirst and Mazzeo, 1996). On the more general point, see Kohn, 1998a.
21. Julyan and Duckworth, 1996, p. 68.
22. Of course, one could ague that getting students to work for A's at age seven may create a habit that will last right through age seventeen—and more's the pity if that's true.
23. Mitchell, 1998. Princeton also turned down more than three quarters of applicants with perfect or near-perfect SAT scores (750–800). Presumably the same is true for other elite colleges.
24. Lilian Katz's distinction between horizontal and vertical relevance is pertinent here. See p. 145.
25. On this point, see Labaree, 1997b.
26. Kasser and Ryan, 1993, 1996. This research was described in Kohn, 1999.
27. These include the Carolina Friends School in Durham, N.C.; the Poughkeepsie Day School in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.; the School Without Walls in Rochester, N.Y.; the Waring School in Beverly, Mass.; Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, N. Y.; and the Metropolitan Learning Center in Portland, Ore. (I would be glad to hear about other high schools that don't use grades; please write to me in care of Houghton Mifflin.) While hundreds of colleges no longer require that applicants take the SAT or ACT (p. 262n1, par. 1), the reality is that grades will probably count more for a student who doesn't submit a test score, and test scores will probably count more for a student whose high school courses weren't graded. At least we should recognize that it's not always necessary to subject students to both. Another reality is that large state universities are more resistant to unconventional applications than are small private colleges simply because of economics: it takes more time, and therefore more money, for admissions officers to read meaningful application materials than it does for them to glance at a GPA or an SAT score and plug it into a formula. But I have heard of high schools approaching the admissions directors of nearby universities and saying, in effect, "We'd like to improve our school by getting rid of grades. Here's why. Will you work with us to make sure our seniors aren't penalized?" This strategy, reminiscent of what was done on a wide scale in the 1930s as part of the Eight-Year Study (see pp. 231–32), may well be successful for the simple reason that not many high schools are requesting this at present and the added inconvenience for admissions offices is likely to be negligible. Of course, if more and more high schools abandon traditional grades, the universities will have no choice but to adapt. This is a change that high schools will have to initiate rather than waiting for colleges to signal their readiness.
28. A survey of college admissions officers revealed that most enjoy the convenience of having applicants ranked against one another but that relatively few actually insist on this practice. Asked what would happen if a high school stopped computing class rank, only 0.5 percent said that that school's applicants would not be considered for admission, 4.5 percent said it would be a "great handicap," and 14.4 percent said it would be a "handicap." In other words, it appears that the absence of class ranks would not interfere at all with students' prospects for admission to four out of five colleges. High schools are slow to change, however. In the same study, about 7.5 percent of high schools reported that they didn't rank students—although the validity of the survey is unclear, given that fewer than one third of the high schools receiving questionnaires responded (Levy and Riordan, 1994). In any case, the number of high schools that do not calculate class rank "will increase, observers suggest, as schools replace traditional student-assessment tools with other types of evaluations" (Diegmueller, 1994, p. 13).
29. National Forum on Assessment, 1995, p. 6.
30. Similarly, getting rid of grades may be necessary but not sufficient for helping students focus on the learning itself. In another of those early monographs on the subject, a California principal wrote that we have to take a look at "the classroom practices from which our grades have inherited most of their weaknesses.... Abolishing grades would not in and of itself alter the attitude of the youth who had grown up under the belief that he is working for the teacher, whose inner pressure for accomplishment goes up and down in response to the teacher's judgment, and who regards assignments as distasteful tasks to be courageously faced until the teacher's demand for the tangible fruits of effort has been appeased" (Linder, 1940, pp. 25–26).
31. Bruner, 1961, p. 28. This is not bad advice for people in offices either. Taken seriously, it would mean an end to performance appraisals, which, in their usual form, do not really provide feedback but "feeddown"—that is, an evaluation (from one's superior) in place of descriptive data. For more on this, see Scholtes, 1998, chap. 9.
32. Interviews with fifty teachers identified as being exceptional at their craft revealed a consistent lack of emphasis on testing, if not a deliberate decision to minimize the practice. See Jackson, 1968/1990. Also, fewer classroom tests were associated with higher scores on the NAEP fourth-grade reading exam (see p. 223).
33. Of course, something may be wrong not with the teacher but with features of the school structure, such as classes that are too large or periods that are too short. This isn't an argument for continuing to grade under those circumstances but for calling those circumstances into question.
35. Involving students in assessing their own learning isn't limited to portfolios. Before beginning any unit, teachers can invite the class to think about the criteria by which their assignments (essays, poems, paintings, math solutions, translations, or whatever) ought to be judged—perhaps on the basis of reviewing other examples of the genre and figuring out together what makes the good ones good and the bad ones bad. Later, students can apply the criteria that they helped to formulate to their own efforts, thereby playing an active role at both stages in the process.
36. The word "rubric" originally described the letters "used in Christian prayer books to give directions on the proper conduct of the religious service" (Mitchell, 1992, p. 34).
37. On this topic, see Le Countryman and Schroeder, 1996, and Stiggins, 1994, pp. 418–21. (The latter book is a useful reference on the whole question of assessment.) There's no reason students can't also be involved in written evaluations of their own learning rather than leaving that up to the teacher (see Routman, 1996, pp. 159–63).
38. For example, see Katz, 1997.
39. This and other interim suggestions for reducing the salience of grades are discussed in Kohn, 1993a, pp. 208–9.
41. Farr and Greene, 1993, p. 21.
42. "Development in young children occurs rapidly; early childhood educators recognize the existence of general stages and sequences of development but also recognize that enormous individual variation occurs in patterns and timing of growth and development that is quite normal and not indicative of pathology." Therefore, "the younger the child, the more difficult it is to obtain reliable and valid results from standardized tests"—although "the ritual use even of 'good tests' (those that are judged to be valid and reliable measures) is to be discouraged in the absence of documented research showing that children benefit from their use" (National Association for the Education of Young Children, 1987, pp. 3, 2).
43. Neill and Medina, 1989, p. 695.
44. High school graduation is usually contingent on passing a certain number of courses, which seems unsatisfactory to a number of critics. Traditionalists, however, merely demand that students should have to pass an exit exam to receive a diploma—an exam that often reflects the worst of standardized tests and is also much more difficult. Marching as usual under the banner of "higher standards," these reformers would make graduation harder rather than making school better (or an assessment of students' learning more meaningful). Ted Sizer (1992) and others affiliated with the Coalition of Essential Schools have instead proposed a series of "exhibitions": elaborate projects that provide evidence of sustained serious thought and proficiency across the disciplines.
45. For example, see Hirsch, 1996, chap. 6.
46. For a summary of relative cost estimates of performance assessments and multiple-choice tests, see Rothman, 1995, p. 168.
47. Here's another interesting example of how a concern with statistical reliability on the part of test manufacturers can eclipse issues of validity: suggestions that the College Board's SAT II biology test ought to be reconfigured to include fewer and better questions have been dismissed by those who design the test on the grounds that such a dramatic change would make it impossible to "say that a 600 score meant the same thing year after year. But why care if a 600 score always means the same thing if it does not measure anything important, [the National Academy of Sciences president Bruce] Alberts asked" ("Science Leader Criticizes Tests," 1998).
48. These quotations are from Resnick and Resnick, 1990, p. 74, and Resnick and Nolan, 1995, p. 115, respectively.
49. For details, see Rothman, pp. 77–89, 158–60, and Darling-Hammond, 1997, pp. 243–44. Kentucky has also developed some innovative performance assessments but unfortunately implemented them within a larger program that uses carrots and sticks to impose and enforce changes (Jones and Whitford, 1997).
50. This is taken from the first page of an unpublished document by Mary A. Barr, "The Learning Record Assessment System." It, along with other documents, is available from the Center for Language in Learning, 10610 Quail Canyon Road, El Cajon, CA 92021—or on the Web at www.learningrecord. org/lrorg. Also see Barr et al., 1999. The Learning Record was adapted from the Primary Language Record, developed in England.
51. For example, see Meisels, 1993. More information on Work Sampling is available from Rebus, Inc., P.O. Box 4479, Ann Arbor, MI 48106, or by calling 1-800-435-3085.
53. In fact, Deborah Meier argues that impressively high interrater reliability in evaluations of students' writing or other projects implies that the scorers are obediently setting aside their own judgment in order to apply a rigid set of criteria.
54. For a useful discussion of these and other issues pertaining to alternative assessments, see Neill et al., 1995.
55. Indeed, someone who is attentive to systemic causes of problems may agree with Alfred North Whitehead (1929/1967, p. 13) that "primarily it is the schools and not the scholars which should be inspected." This, it is important to add, is not an argument for the kind of "inspection" entailed by standardized tests.
58. Many of the ideas in the preceding half-dozen paragraphs have grown out of conversations I've had with Deborah Meier. I owe a great deal to her incisive analysis of these issues.
59. One example: the Central Park East Secondary School in New York City brings in external reviewers—experts who don't teach at the school—to look at, talk about, and rate a sample of what students have done through the year "in order to provide all concerned parties with a 'second' look at our criteria and standards. This is for the purpose solely of assessing the school's standards, not the individual's right to a diploma" (Central Park East, 1993, p. 24).
60. Jones, 1998. Two other authors point out that "measurement-driven instruction" is "merely an extension of behaviorist psychology," so when policy makers continue to depend on "coercion to create uniformity"—except now as a way to get higher-quality instruction—they just create a fatal inconsistency between what is done to teachers and what teachers are expected to do with students (Noble and Smith).
61. On this point, see Airasian, 1988.
62. Maehr and Midgley, 1996, p. 7. This point is frequently overlooked by educators who promote more "authentic" assessments without attending to the psychological significance of evaluation itself.
63. Rothman, p. 153. Also see Farr and Greene, p. 26.
64. One concrete illustration: "Using portfolios makes little sense if instruction is dominated by worksheets so that every portfolio looks the same" (Neill et al., p. 4).
65. Paris et al., 1991, p. 17.
66. Along the same lines, one first-grade teacher in Kentucky worked with her students to develop "their own reading program, which moves them faster and more effectively through (and beyond) the district's reading program objectives than the basal. Even so, she is required by her school's administration to put her class through a basal reader program on a prescribed weekly schedule. The solution, quickly evolved by the class: they do each week's work in the basal on Monday, with little effort, then work on the meaningful curriculum—theirs—Tuesday through Friday" (Smith, 1994, p. 29).
67. "You don't need to study only the test and distort your entire curriculum eight hours a day, 180 days a year, for 12 years," says Harvey Daniels (1993, p. 5), a leading teacher educator at National-Louis University. "We've got very interesting studies where teachers do 35 or 38 weeks of what they think is best for kids, and then they'll give them three weeks of test cramming just before the test. And the kids do just as well as kids who have 40 weeks of test-driven curriculum." This is corroborated by a study that found a one-hour intensive reading readiness tutorial for young children produced test results equivalent to two years of skills-oriented direct instruction (Karnes et al., 1983). Of course, this will vary depending on the nature of the test.
68. Two excellent guides for teachers along these lines: Taylor and Walton 1998; and Calkins et al. 1998. Several articles in the December 1996/January 1997 issue of Educational Leadership are also relevant. One teacher suggests using tests as part of the curriculum so students can critically analyze their content (Christensen, 1999).
69. On this general point, see Appendix A. On the relevance of the discipline being tested, see p. 302n99.
70. Shepard and Bliem, 1993. The quotation appears on p. 29.
71. Stolberg, 1989. See also Rossi, 1999.
72. See "Testing Boycott in Denver," 1992.
73. The first two quotations are from Van Moorlehem and Audi, 1998; the third is from Van Moorlehem, 1998. National attention was briefly focused on the fact that two thirds of the 500 juniors in a very wealthy suburb of Detroit had requested waivers from the test the previous year (see Johnston, 1997). Overall, "those opting out of the test tend to be average or above-average students," some of whom wore T-shirts that urged their peers to JUST SAY NO to the test (Van Moorlehem).
74. For example, see the following Web site: www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/meap. html.
75. Contact Mary O'Brien at sobrien@columbus.rr.com or 614-487-0477.
78. Coles, 1994. Quotations are taken from pp. 16, 23.
79. FairTest: 342 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02138; 617-864-4810; www. fairtest.org.
APPENDIX A: THE HARD EVIDENCE
1. This is especially ironic in light of Hirsch's pointed assertions that the position he supports has "strong scientific foundations" in the sort of "consensus mainstream science" that is "published in the most rigorous scientific journals," while the other side "invokes research very selectively" (Hirsch, 1998, pp. 38, 39; 1996, p. 127).
2. Hirsch, 1996, pp. 181, 182. And yet again: "Effort and learning have declined wherever grades and tests have been abolished. Human nature has proved to be robust. Evolutionary psychologists have argued that all humans retain a residue of competitiveness" (p. 245). Note the conflation of grades, tests, and competition, which are, of course, three distinct phenomena: grades aren't competitive if everyone in the class can theoretically receive an A; not all tests are graded and not all grades are based on tests. (Elsewhere he seems to equate "extrinsic motivation" with "discipline, toil, or sweat," implying that those who criticize the first are enemies of the second [p. 214].)
3. Gold et al., 1971. The quotation appears on p. 20.
4. In a previous book, Hirsch referred to a "recent consensus among reading researchers that adequate literacy depends upon the specific information called 'cultural literacy.' " But this claim is "simply not accurate," rejoined Stephen Tchudi (1987/1988, p. 72), director of the Center for Literacy and Learning at Michigan State University. "To the extent that a consensus exists among reading researchers, it does not include a mandate to 'impart traditional literature culture to children at the earliest possible age.' A considerable amount of reading research does emphasize the informational background of the reader, but 'background' includes not only factual information, but also the experiences, attitudes, and values the reader brings to a text."
Similar examples from his more recent book (1996):
1. Hirsch's claim: "Cultural Literacy's general argument is confirmed" (p. 12). The reality: The first study cited to support the idea that children should memorize a compendium of facts in order to become "culturally literate" discovered nothing more than a correlation between fifth-graders' scores on a cultural literacy test and their scores on a standardized test and an IQ test—hardly surprising in light of the kind of knowledge with which one must be familiar to do well on the latter tests. Moreover, the researchers list several possible "plausible interpretations" of the correlation, concluding that "because the study was not able to establish definite causality between cultural literacy and academic achievement, it should not be considered unequivocal or strongly prescriptive" (Kosmoski et al., 1990, p. 271; Hirsch omits this key disclaimer). The next study Hirsch cites (Pentony, 1992) reported nothing more than a moderate correlation between verbal SAT scores and freshman English grades, which hardly qualifies as substantiation for Hirsch's theories.
2. Hirsch's claim: In the course of arguing against the kind of curriculum intended to promote critical thinking skills, he writes, "People who have just finished a one-semester course in logic are only marginally more logical than people who have never taken logic. Other experiments show that training in abstract 'higher-order skills' does not much improve thinking" (p. 137). The reality: The first sentence assumes that efforts to promote critical thinking skills are equivalent to a course in logic, a pretty good example of illogic in itself. As for the second sentence, even apart from Hirsch's omission of a large body of research supporting the usefulness of training in critical thinking skills, the single source cited in his footnote (Klaczynski and Laipple, 1993) doesn't support anything close to a generalized recommendation to avoid such training. Rather, it examines the narrow, highly specialized hypothesis that "when incorrect strategies for solving domain-specific problems were contradicted, a domain-general rule would be induced and would subsequently facilitate transfer to problems outside of the original domain" (p. 653).
3. Hirsch's claim: "In a highly significant but rarely discussed study, [W. James] Popham showed that because of the failure to instruct prospective teachers about the best research into effective pedagogical methods (the findings of which happen to contravene the naturalistic approaches that continue to be advocated), uncertified persons, plopped into the classroom without having taken education courses, got results that were as good as those obtained by certified and experienced teachers" (p. 230). The reality: (a) The key to Hirsch's argument is not that uncertified teachers were successful but the statement that certified teachers did no better because they weren't properly instructed. Contrary to the impression he gives, however, this attribution was not a finding of the study at all but merely a speculation offered by Popham (1971) in his discussion section, (b) The claim that "the best research into effective pedagogical methods" challenges "naturalistic approaches" (which Hirsch equates with virtually any educational model that isn't his) wasn't even addressed by Popham's paper, (c) Finally, the "results" were based on highly specific indicators of performance, suggesting the possibility that these measures and the kind of instruction they favored may have accounted for the relative success of untrained teachers.
Sometimes Hirsch makes assertions that are debatable, to put it charitably, claiming that research backs him up but offering none. To wit: "an appropriate emphasis on transmitting knowledge results in students who actually possess ... skills such as critical thinking and learning to learn" (p. 219); "the research also shows that external incentives combined with intrinsic ones work better than intrinsic incentives alone" (p. 230); "research into teaching methods has consistently shown that discovery learning is the least effective method of instruction" (p. 250); "hands-on, project-style teaching has been shown to be highly ineffective" (p. 269); and "anti-rote-learning reforms being advocated are already firmly in place" since they are "essentially the project-oriented, child-centered methods that have long dominated American educational thought and have prevailed for decades in our schools" (pp. 49, 132). (The kindest interpretation of this last unsubstantiated and demonstrably false assertion is that Hirsch "mistakes the talk of some professors of education, often misconstrued and taken out of context, as the reality of the American public school" [Feinberg, 1997, p. 29]). Not every assertion in a book needs to be backed by a study, of course, but it seems slightly suspicious when specific empirical claims, particularly those dressed up with phrases such as "research ... has consistently shown," are bereft of citations. This is all the more true when a good deal of evidence contradicts such claims.
On other occasions, Hirsch does cite research, and does so accurately, but he presents the findings in such a way as to imply falsely that his recommendations for traditional education (or his criticisms of progressive education) are bolstered by these findings:
• "Lack of stimulation has depressed [some children's] IQs" (p. 20). This reasonable proposition is used to imply that "stimulation"—or, in a later passage, making sure children are "ready to learn" (p. 228)—signifies the practice of having children focus on lists of facts that every nth grader should know.
• "There is a great deal of evidence, indeed a consensus in cognitive psychology, that people who are able to think independently about unfamiliar problems and who are broad-gauged problems solvers, critical thinkers, and lifelong learners are, without exception, well-informed people" (p. 144). No sources are offered here, but let's stipulate that it's true. Because people who think effectively are also well informed, Hirsch invites us to infer that the former is caused by the latter—which is to say, that making children acquire more information will turn them into problem solvers and lifelong learners. Not only is there no reason to accept this, but precisely the reverse may be true: this kind of teaching may undermine an interest in learning and reduce the time available for learning how to solve problems.
• "Every decent job available in a modern economy is dependent upon communication and learning—two activities that take place primarily through the medium of words" (p. 110). Few would dispute this, but many would dispute his larger point, that becoming familiar with "the medium of words" entails his specific model for teaching language arts.
• "Psychological research has shown that the ability to learn something new depends on an ability to accommodate the new thing to the already known" (p. 23). There is no citation here, so we can only guess that he is talking about the work of Piaget and other constructivists. Unfortunately, the "already known" refers to the theories that people have developed about the world; this research in no way supports (and, in some respects, actually challenges) the idea that acquiring more facts is a condition for later learning. Later, Hirsch faults this same tradition of "developmentalism" for believing that "there is a natural age (usually after age eight) for introducing bookish content" (p. 84). The actual caution concerns the introduction of concepts beyond children's cognitive capacity. The invocation of "bookish content" suggests an attempt to saddle the developmental tradition with a naive Romanticism that makes an easier target.
Apart from his questionable use of research, Hirsch frequently tries to get away with a kind of intellectual sleight of hand, arguing for one thing and then proceeding as if he's demonstrated something else entirely. One minute he is talking about people who want to educate the "whole child"; the next, he is criticizing the "faith in the unerring goodness of whatever comes forth from the child" (p. 78) as if these two were equivalent. He collapses interdisciplinary learning into the Summerhill model (p. 96) and equates a rejection of his cultural literacy model with "anti-intellectualism" (pp. 106, 245). After making fun of academic standards that lack specific content, he proceeds as if he's proved there's something wrong with a lack of specific content in the teaching itself (p. 32). He is keen to attack something he calls "natural pedagogy"—the straw man of Romanticism again—and then goes a step further, attributing to it the belief that "innate ability is the royal road to all learning." (Not surprisingly, no proof is offered that anyone actually believes this.) He, by contrast, proudly defends an emphasis on "effort," which we are encouraged to believe is tantamount to the use of "drill and practice" (p. 87).
A number of conservatives have welcomed Hirsch's book as the best case that can be made for traditional education. They may be right.
6. See the discussion of Follow Through, below.
8. Stebbins et al., 1977, p. 166.
9. There is strong reason to doubt whether tests billed as measuring complex "cognitive, conceptual skills" really did so. Even the primary analysts conceded that "the measures on the cognitive and affective domains are much less appropriate" than is the main skills test (Stebbins et al., p. 35). A group of experts on experimental design commissioned to review the study went even further, stating that the project "amounts essentially to a comparative study of the effects of Follow Through models on the mechanics of reading, writing, and arithmetic" (House et al., 1978, p. 145). (This raises the interesting question of whether it is even possible to measure the conceptual understanding or cognitive sophistication of young children with a standardized test.)
11. Anderson et al, 1978, p. 164.
12. The outside evaluators concluded that the original data analysts had defined an "effect" in such a way as to confound "the effectiveness of a program with its number of pupils" so that "larger programs could appear to be more effective" (House et al., p. 146). They also argued that the level of analysis—individual children rather than schools or sites—had the effect of biasing the results in favor of the Direct Instruction model (pp. 151–52). Meanwhile, the General Accounting Office's official review of the Follow Through research found that problems "in both the initial design and implementation of the experiment will limit OE's [the Office of Education's] ability to reach statistically reliable overall conclusions on the success or lack of success of the approaches for teaching young disadvantaged children. The problems cannot practicably be overcome, and, when combined with the OE contractor's reservations about design and measurement problems, raise questions about the experiment's dependability to judge the approaches" (Office of Education, 1975, p. 25).
13. House et al., pp. 130, 156.
14. Manzo, 1998c, p. 37; Winerip, 1998, pp. 88–89.
15. Linda Darling-Hammond (1997, p. 50) gives the example of the failure of the "heavily prescriptive, rigidly enforced competency-based curriculum (CBC) [which] was introduced [into Washington, D.C., schools] in the 1980s and has continued in effect throughout the years the district's performance has plummeted."
16. The High/Scope curriculum, based on Piaget's ideas, sees "the child as a self-initiating active learner" and places "a primary emphasis on problem solving and independent thinking.... Teachers do not simply stand out of the way and permit free play, but rather guide children's choices toward developmentally appropriate experiences" (Schweinhart and Hohmann, 1992, pp. 16–18). "Developmentally appropriate" practice emphasizes meeting the "individual needs" of the "whole child," providing "activities that are relevant and meaningful," with plenty of opportunity for "active exploration and concrete, hands-on experiences" in order to tap "children's natural curiosity and desire to make sense of their world." Developmentally inappropriate classrooms, by contrast, segment the preschool or kindergarten curriculum into the traditional content areas, rely heavily on rewards and punitive consequences, give children little choice about what they're doing, ignore individual differences, and use standardized tests (Hart et al., 1997, pp. 4–5).
18. Schweinhart et al., 1986. The difference in book reading didn't reach conventional levels of significance (p=.09). Advocates of Direct Instruction conducted a longitudinal study of their own, comparing some of the original DI Follow Through students in four communities to those from matched comparison schools when they were in high school. They reported finding either better standardized test results or higher graduation rates (but not necessarily both) for DI students (Gersten and Keating, 1987). However, unlike the Ypsilanti study and the others described here, there was no attempt to compare the results for DI and distinctly different types of programs. It's unclear what model of instruction, if any, characterized the primary school experience of the comparison students. If they received a less systematic version of the same kind of basic skills training that the DI students got—which is entirely possible in light of how pervasive this kind of teaching was and is in the United States—then these results hardly lend support to the basic philosophy common to both conditions.
19. Schweinhart and Weikart, 1997.
21. Charlesworth et al., 1993, pp. 18–22.
23. Stipek et al., 1995. A little over half of these children were Latino or African-American, and 42 percent were from low-income households.
26. Weaver and Brinkley, 1998, p. 137.
27. Much has been written on this subject by proponents of Whole Language, but one of the best articles is still a relatively early essay by Deborah Meier (1981) entitled "Why Reading Tests Don't Test Reading."
29. When claims are made for the effectiveness of Direct Instruction and other skills-based techniques, it's worth asking not only what kind of effect has been shown (simple decoding vs. comprehension) but how the study was designed. This would seem to be a clear case where a comparison group using a different approach to reading instruction would be necessary. To show that DI produced gains doesn't say much in itself: the children may have grown more proficient even without the intervention, or they may have benefited from the extra resources and attention that came from the introduction of DI rather than from some characteristic of the program itself.
30. For a review of research on this question, see Weaver et al., 1996, esp. pp. 283–85. Also see McQuillan, 1998, chap. 5.
31. On this point, see p. 284n9 and Weaver et al., p. 104.
32. Allington and Woodside-Jiron, 1998, p. 149.
33. Freeman and Freeman, 1998, p. 77.
34. NAEP scores weren't broken down by state before 1992, so California's scores that year can't be used to prove a decline from previous years. Nor do other kinds of tests permit the conclusion that reading achievement dropped during the period in question. See McQuillan, pp. 12–14.
36. Freeman and Freeman, p. 78.
39. Eldredge and Butterfield, 1986.
42. Varble, 1990. The same study compared two sixth-grade classrooms as well and found no significant differences on mechanics or content between the two conditions.
49. Weaver et al., p. 286. The authors acknowledge that the direct instruction of phonics, "particularly with children labeled at risk or reading disabled, when they are tutored one-on-one or in very small groups," can produce "higher initial scores on phonemic awareness and word attack skills and sometimes on comprehension tests," but "this advantage appears not to last very long, particularly for comprehension tests."
50. Allington, 1983, p. 554. A subsequent study of second- and fourth-graders in five varied school districts confirmed that "low achievement instructional groups frequently focused on oral reading accuracy and concentrated instruction at the word level. When larger units of text were the focus—stories, for instance—accuracy remained the critical feature of instruction, with oral reading tasks that evidenced little, if any, emphasis on comprehension" (Allington and McGill-Franzen, 1989, p. 83).
51. See the discussion of this point and the accompanying citations in Fielding and Pearson, 1994.
52. The first-grade study: Milligan and Berg, 1992. The kindergarten study: Sacks and Mergendoller, 1997.
53. Success for All, designed by Robert Slavin and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University, "tells schools precisely what to teach and how to teach it—to the point of scripting, nearly minute by minute, every teacher's activity in every classroom every day of the year.... Teachers must use a series of catch phrases and hand signals developed by Success for All. In kindergarten and first grade every piece of classroom material (readers, posters, tapes, videos, lesson plans, books—everything) is provided by the program.... Success for All ... teaches reading primarily through phonics.... Students are tested, put into groups based on their skills levels, drilled in reading skills, regrouped, and drilled some more....[A first-grade] teacher stands at the blackboard and says, 'Okay, let's get ready for our shared story. Ready, read!' The students read the first page of the story loudly, in unison.... 'Okay, do your first word,' she says. The students call out together, 'Only! 0[clap] N[clap] L[clap] Yfclap]. Only!'...'If you work right, you'll earn points for your work team! You clear?' Twenty voices call out, 'Yes!' " (Lemann, 1998, pp. 98–99). Keep in mind that this account is offered by a journalist who supports the program, at least for poor schools.
54. Purcell-Gates et al., 1995, p. 678.
55. Lisa Delpit, with whom this argument is often associated, has added that "literacy instruction should be in the context of real reading and real writing, and reading and writing for real purposes. This means using literature that children like and that connects with them in their homes and lives. It means writing for purposes the children find useful" (Delpit, 1992).
57. Eldredge, 1991; Otto, 1993; and Purcell-Gates et al., 1995.
58. The NAEP questionnaire results appear on pp. 451, 471, and 501 of the National Reading Assessments, Data Almanac, available on the Internet at www.nces.ed.gov/naep/y25alm/n04rlc.pdf. Data for 1998, released just as this book was going to press, confirmed that there was a significant correlation between fourth-graders' test scores and how often they were permitted to read books of their own choosing. This was not true in eighth or twelfth grade, however, suggesting that letting students read whatever they wanted may have had a different meaning, and different implications for the quality of instruction, in the context of a 45-minute English class.
59. These NAEP results were cited in McQuillan, pp. 14, 90.
60. Mixed results (a difference favoring WL in one study, no differences in two others) were obtained by one group of researchers who have generally been critical of WL (McKenna et al., 1995), but every other study I could find that measured attitudes, motivation, or reading outside of school demonstrated a clear advantage for WL or a literature-based program: Eldredge, 1991; Eldredge and Butterfield, 1986; Morrow, 1992; and Kasten and Clarke, 1989, a study that looked at disadvantaged minority children. (Also see the review of research on this topic in McQuillan, pp. 63–64.) Interestingly, even a recent study spearheaded by long-time advocates of direct instruction that claimed to show an advantage for that approach—a study widely cited by people of similar persuasion and harshly criticized for its methodology by WL advocates—found significantly more positive attitudes toward reading among the children receiving something that was supposed to resemble WL than among those getting a skills-based approach (Foorman et al., 1998, p. 50).
61. Five studies are cited in support of this conclusion by Clarke, 1988, p. 281.
63. Clarke, esp. pp. 295, 304.
65. Elley et al., 1976. The quotation appears on p. 5.
66. Hillocks and Smith, 1991. Quotations appear on pp. 597 and 600. A more recent review of the research arrives at the same conclusion. "There simply is not a high correlation between knowledge of grammatical terminology and the ability to use the language. [We should] stop teaching traditional schoolroom 'grammar' entirely" (Schuster, 1999. Quotations appear on pp. 523, 524).
67. See Stigler and Hiebert, 1997; and Lawton, 1997. Other differences between U.S. and Japanese instruction may also contribute to differences in results. Japanese teachers meet regularly in small groups so they can evaluate their teaching and improve their craft (Stigler and Hiebert, p. 20). Also, Japan, like many other countries, does not "track" students by putative ability (Schmidt et al., in press).
68. Schmidt et al., pp. 10, 15, 18, 25–26.
70. Mathews, 1998b. The report, prepared by Harold Wenglinsky of the Educational Testing Service, also found that African-American children were especially likely to use computers for drill-'n-skill purposes. Once again, a back-to-basics approach to instruction is disproportionately used for children of color—to their detriment.
71. Carpenter et al., 1989. Quotations appear on pp. 525, 527.
78. Wood and Sellers, 1996, 1997.
82. Linda Joseph, quoted in Kamii, 1989, p. 155.
83. Cobb et al., 1989, pp. 137, 139, 144.
84. For example, the students in traditional classrooms who "worked hard and stayed on task" in one study nevertheless "found mathematics lessons ... extremely boring and tedious" (Boaler, p. 45).
85. Mackenzie and White, 1982.
86. Bredderman, 1983. Quotation appears on p. 513.
87. Rothenberg, 1989, p. 70. Also see Horwitz, 1979; and Walberg, 1984. "Several widely reported studies that found students in open classrooms had significantly lower academic achievement ... were later shown to be erroneous....One particularly flawed study...'trumpeted the failure' of open classrooms ... and helped turn the tide against them (Rothenberg, p. 77).
88. Knapp et al., 1992. Quotations appear on pp. i, 27.
89. This is from the introduction to Volume 5 of the report Adventure in American Education, quoted in Adams, 1988, p. 161. All five volumes were published in the early 1940s, each with a different author. Of special interest are Volume 1: The Story of the Eight Year Study, by Wilford M. Aiken, and Volume 4: Did They Succeed in Collegef by Dean Chamberlin et al. Apart from the Adams article just cited, also see descriptions of the study in Ritchie, 1971; and Irwin, 1991.
90. This, in turn, is but one slice of a much broader and deeper line of psychologicalresearch demonstrating the positive effects of having a sense of control and the negative effects of feeling powerless, something that seems to be true at all ages.
91. Collages: Amabile and Gitomer, 1984. Second-graders' schedules: Wang and Stiles, 1976. High school chemistry: Rainey, 1965. Low-income minority children: de Charms, 1972. Sixth-grade standardized achievement scores: Boggiano et al., 1992.
92. Elementary school vocabulary: Berk, 1976. Middle school math: Keinan and Zeidner, 1987. Tenth-grade typing: Alschuler, 1969.
93. One review of NAEP data from the 1970s found that the extent to which teachers were perceived as having control of the science classroom was positively related to science achievement scores but negatively related to students' continuing motivation to learn about science (Pascarella et al., 1981). However, recall that in the 1990s, NAEP reading results for fourth-graders were positively related to how often students could read books of their own choosing (p. 223).
94. Undergraduates required to participate in an experiment did not perform better on tests just because they were allowed to choose which of two or three essays to read. They did, however, report more interest in the text than those told which ones to read (Schraw et al., 1998). Another experiment that offered undergraduates what might be viewed as a more substantive opportunity for decision-making—namely, which strategy to use in solving difficult conceptual problems—did find better test performance for this group than for students told how they should solve the problems, even though the strategies themselves were identical in the two conditions (Boggiano, Flink, Shields, Seelbach, and Barrett, 1992, reported in Boggiano et al., 1992, p. 280).
95. South African elementary school: Green and Foster, 1986. Canadian high school: Fry and Cole, 1980. Undergraduate puzzles: Zuckerman et al., 1978. Try more difficult tasks: Kuhl and Blankenship, 1979. Gain confidence: Ryan and Grolnick, 1986.
96. See the sources cited in chapter 8.
97. For example, see Battistich et al., 1995, 1997.
98. For example, Lauren Resnick, Howard Gardner, Ann Brown, and others.
99. Monty Neill, a thoughtful critic of standardized tests, has pointed out (personal communication, 1998) that this may be more true in some subject areas than in others. While some talented students will test poorly, even silly, superficial tests in reading and math will often reflect something of what children have gained from the rich, conceptual learning that goes on in progressive classrooms. But the truly horrendous standardized tests that many of our children must take in science and social studies are often no more than lists of specialized vocabulary words. To that extent, in-depth, interdisciplinary projects may not be good preparation for such exams. It will take courage to persevere with such teaching in the face of this gap.
APPENDIX B: WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN A CLASSROOM
1. Deci and Ryan (e.g., 1985) have labeled these three needs autonomy, relatedness, and competence.