hacking education

Interesting post from the Washington Post last Friday about the shortcomings of standardized tests. I concur and believe that I have a solution that can help move us past our dependancy on standardized tests. Drop your email at MotionSpark.com to stay informed on my new startup.

We often forget that there is nothing fixed or natural about “school” but that, like all institutions, it evolves in response to historical circumstances. In the case of standardized testing, the multiple-choice exam has had an impact far beyond the crisis that inspired it, and a reach and application far beyond what its inventor intended.

Institutions of education should be preparing our kids for their future — not for our past. In the Internet age, we are saddled with an educational system that was designed for the industrial age, modeled on mass production and designed for efficiency, not for high standards.

We know that bubble tests address only a quarter of the kinds of knowledge students master in schools. For low-income kids, who have limited resources for college costs and thus little reason to think that their test scores matter to their future, the exams can seem irrelevant. For them, low scores can denote not just a possible lack of knowledge but also a possible lack of motivation to concentrate on the exam. Affluent kids, if they pay enough and take enough test-prep courses, can get higher scores.

We are not teaching and testing our students for responsible participation in the interactive digital age.

We’re facing a crisis in education today, much like Kelly faced in 1914. The U.S. high school completion rate is dropping slightly in real terms, and dramatically relative to other industrialized nations. But even more serious is the rate at which teachers are leaving the profession. Teacher attrition has increased by more than 50 percent in the past decade, and it is often the best teachers who leave first, many citing the demoralizing testing requirements of No Child Left Behind.

Right now, we have teachers, out of self-preservation and to protect their schools and their students, teaching to a test that was designed in the era of the Model T. We are 15 years into the information age. Now is the time to begin to rethink how we assess learning for the challenges of the digital world that lie ahead. It’s not as simple as filling in the bubbles.

Via Washington Post