Where everybody is above average
Kimberly Swygert's category "Anti-Testing Hysteria" contains some howlingly funny stuff and says pretty much everything that I want to say but better. In a similar vein, "Killing the Messenger: Attacks on the SAT" by Steve Dutch slices and dices the standard excuses used by opponents of standardized tests.
Isn't it pretty strange how people who are stupid always seem to be "unable to take standardized tests", because they are so special but the test just doesn't consider how special and good people they are? Conversely, people who are smart in real-word situations always tend to turn out to be good in taking all kinds of standardized tests. What an absolutely astonishing coincidence in a world where nothing can ever predict anything about anybody. I wonder if the anti-testing crowd with all their emphasis on "feelings" and "moral development" and "having fun" would be willing to bet their lives on this haughty belief so that when they need to have surgery or to fly to another continent, they would use a surgeon or a pilot who "wasn't good at taking tests" since he was a "practical learner" so he never went to a medical school or pilot school but learned on his own at his own pace? I think not!
Finland doesn't have SAT exams, but at the end of high school, there are national exams of various subjects that were taught in school. Departments of universities and other schools then decide how much weight they are going to put to each topic. For example, a technical university might look at only math and science exams. This system works very well, since it guarantees fair evaluation of students in all schools throughout the nation and thus gives everybody the same shot for higher education. I would imagine Americans have their SAT exams for the very same reason.
Based on the little that I have read of "No Child Left Behind Act", I think it is a great idea and support it. If I have understood correctly, this Act would introduce standardized testing throughout the elementary school. I had the same idea myself years ago so that at the end of each year, there would be a national standardized test in every subject whose passing is required for the student to move on to the next grade. I just can't understand why some kid who hasn't learned what he was supposed to learn in the fifth grade gets to proceed to the sixth grade, where he will then understand even less and will only cause trouble. What is the freaking point? Hold him back a grade. And if some kid is held back twice, some kind of special ed instead of normal school might be an appropriate place for him. Or perhaps his parents could take this little misunderstood moochie-poochie for whom the boring normal school is a totally wrong place to be and put him in some special alternative school or even homeschool him so that he could reach his full potential and grow as a caring person and an individual who refuses to be reduced to a number.
Standardized testing would also bring bad teachers to light, which is probably a big reason why they are so bitterly opposed. Especially if these tests would also determine the funding for schools so that the better the kids do, the more money the school gets. In the upside-down logic of pomo leftism, of course it ought to be the other way around so that the worse a school does, the more money it is rewarded for it. Apparently the people who believe this have never heard of BartCop's Second Law, which says that every time somebody makes a mistake that puts money in his pockets, he will keep doing that same mistake. Incentives matter, and if you reward inferiority, that's what you will end up getting.
It is even harder for me to understand why all kids should be taught together in the first place, since we know that their skills, motivation and aptitude vary so tremendously. As much as I disagree with the author of the article "What Is the Value of Algebra?" about the uselessness of algebra, it is true that not every student needs or is even able to learn the skills necessary for university studies in science and math. So why do we try to keep all kids together and try to teach them all the exact same things? It simply doesn't work and doesn't produce the results we pretend that it does. Would any sane person bet his life on the fact that the average high school student knows even the basic facts of general knowledge?
There are those standard excuses of having the kids "learn together" and "learn to respect different people", but the only thing that comes from putting Nelson Muntz and Martin Prince in the same class is to teach Martin to shut up and avoid getting beaten up. Nelson will behave even worse to compensate for his lower intelligence than he would be in a class full of other Nelsons and taught in their level, whereas Martin will just be bored for not being challenged enough. Most of the teacher's time and effort will go to special attention to Nelson and his little posse that he drags down with him.
We need to totally give up the pomo leftist fantasies that "everybody can learn everything", "there are no stupid people" and "having fun, building a good self-esteem and learning to respect others are the most important goals". This becomes evident in reality-based subjects that have objective standards, which tend to make intelligence differences too obvious to deny and therefore hurt the self-esteem of the bottom half of the bell curve. But then again, the whole point of having objective standards is to discriminate between right and wrong, correct and incorrect, smart and stupid. In other words, to acknowledge the existence of objective reality, which you can only deny so long no matter how "open-minded" and "understanding" you are. Even the most postmodernist and socially conscious leftist might feel a certain nasty tinge in her stomach if she knew that the surgeon who is about to operate on her has an IQ of 80 and a combined SAT score of 600. Crusading against standardized tests is basically crusading against objective reality itself. Once we remember that objective reality is the number one enemy of every social constructionist, we understand why standardized tests are so hysterically opposed.
Lose the fiction of everybody being the same and make it so that within the same school, there are completely separate tracks for students of different aptitudes, with students moving up and down according to their results. In fact, the schools themselves should specialize for different aptitude levels of students, in the exact same way that restaurants specialize for different wealth and gastronomical levels of their diners. With a more homogeneous student body, each school could teach its students optimally with material geared to their level. Of course, a handful of late-blossoming students would find the doors of higher education unfairly closed to them, but since for every misunderstood genius there are a hundred correctly understood morons, the total net result would be much better than the current system.
And of course, this is how it used to be in Finland before socialists decided that it is bad and unfair, because for some mysterious reason, a kid from a poor family who hates reading is not as likely to study in a university as a kid from a middle-class family who reads a lot. There must be some kind of bad and systematic discrimination going on, since such inequality of results cannot be explained in any other way! Thus first went the aptitude separation between schools, and then went the aptitude separation within schools, gradually leading to the disaster that is not even close to the current American situation where many high school graduates can't even read or write. But based on what I have read, we are slowly getting there.
At least the Finnish schools don't yet resemble war zones and require security guards and metal detectors. Speaking of which, I don't know what the discipline of the average junior high in USA or Canada is like these days, but that's one thing that I seriously can't understand: why do the teachers tolerate this? I'm pretty sure that if doctors, taxi drivers, janitors, policemen or members of any other profession had to encounter similar namecalling, disrespect, disobedience and threats of violence in their line of work, their unions would have already organized strikes and other such actions to remedy this. So why do the teacher's unions just meekly sit and accept every single idiotic change that only makes things worse? Why don't they stand up and say "That's freaking enough! We're mad as hell and we're not gonna take this any more!" Their members are able to see the change to worse with their own eyes, so why do their unions ignore their members and keep listening to few postmodern and relativist "educational theorists" who say that all grading and discipline is bad and what matters is whether the student grows up to be an individual with a good self-esteem? (Seriously, is there an advanced degree more useless and worthless than an Ed.D. ? Other than a degree in women's studies or home economics, of course.)
Second, I don't understand what's the big idea of forcing the little troublemakers to stay in school if they don't want to. We know perfectly well that the defiant little punks who constantly cause problems are not going to learn anything no matter how hard the teachers try to persuade them, and will only harm other students who are forced to spend their days with them. So why bother pretending that it would be otherwise? Just let these people go and be done with it: they have already learned what little they need to know to do the toilet cleaning and gas pumping jobs that they are going to do in adulthood.
In fact, if every single class purged about two or three of its worst-behaving students, I guarantee that these schools would suddenly massively improve without these troublemakers. Similarly, instead of high school diploma being some kind of a basic human right, high schools should massively limit their student intake to improve their overall quality. Perhaps something like one third of kids should start working after junior high, not going to high school at all. This little change would vastly improve the atmosphere and results of high schools, and save a lot of money while doing it. It is ridiculous to demand a high school diploma or a bachelor's degree for jobs that really require neither except as a signalling mechanism.
Isn't it pretty strange how people who are stupid always seem to be "unable to take standardized tests", because they are so special but the test just doesn't consider how special and good people they are? Conversely, people who are smart in real-word situations always tend to turn out to be good in taking all kinds of standardized tests. What an absolutely astonishing coincidence in a world where nothing can ever predict anything about anybody. I wonder if the anti-testing crowd with all their emphasis on "feelings" and "moral development" and "having fun" would be willing to bet their lives on this haughty belief so that when they need to have surgery or to fly to another continent, they would use a surgeon or a pilot who "wasn't good at taking tests" since he was a "practical learner" so he never went to a medical school or pilot school but learned on his own at his own pace? I think not!
Finland doesn't have SAT exams, but at the end of high school, there are national exams of various subjects that were taught in school. Departments of universities and other schools then decide how much weight they are going to put to each topic. For example, a technical university might look at only math and science exams. This system works very well, since it guarantees fair evaluation of students in all schools throughout the nation and thus gives everybody the same shot for higher education. I would imagine Americans have their SAT exams for the very same reason.
Based on the little that I have read of "No Child Left Behind Act", I think it is a great idea and support it. If I have understood correctly, this Act would introduce standardized testing throughout the elementary school. I had the same idea myself years ago so that at the end of each year, there would be a national standardized test in every subject whose passing is required for the student to move on to the next grade. I just can't understand why some kid who hasn't learned what he was supposed to learn in the fifth grade gets to proceed to the sixth grade, where he will then understand even less and will only cause trouble. What is the freaking point? Hold him back a grade. And if some kid is held back twice, some kind of special ed instead of normal school might be an appropriate place for him. Or perhaps his parents could take this little misunderstood moochie-poochie for whom the boring normal school is a totally wrong place to be and put him in some special alternative school or even homeschool him so that he could reach his full potential and grow as a caring person and an individual who refuses to be reduced to a number.
Standardized testing would also bring bad teachers to light, which is probably a big reason why they are so bitterly opposed. Especially if these tests would also determine the funding for schools so that the better the kids do, the more money the school gets. In the upside-down logic of pomo leftism, of course it ought to be the other way around so that the worse a school does, the more money it is rewarded for it. Apparently the people who believe this have never heard of BartCop's Second Law, which says that every time somebody makes a mistake that puts money in his pockets, he will keep doing that same mistake. Incentives matter, and if you reward inferiority, that's what you will end up getting.
It is even harder for me to understand why all kids should be taught together in the first place, since we know that their skills, motivation and aptitude vary so tremendously. As much as I disagree with the author of the article "What Is the Value of Algebra?" about the uselessness of algebra, it is true that not every student needs or is even able to learn the skills necessary for university studies in science and math. So why do we try to keep all kids together and try to teach them all the exact same things? It simply doesn't work and doesn't produce the results we pretend that it does. Would any sane person bet his life on the fact that the average high school student knows even the basic facts of general knowledge?
There are those standard excuses of having the kids "learn together" and "learn to respect different people", but the only thing that comes from putting Nelson Muntz and Martin Prince in the same class is to teach Martin to shut up and avoid getting beaten up. Nelson will behave even worse to compensate for his lower intelligence than he would be in a class full of other Nelsons and taught in their level, whereas Martin will just be bored for not being challenged enough. Most of the teacher's time and effort will go to special attention to Nelson and his little posse that he drags down with him.
We need to totally give up the pomo leftist fantasies that "everybody can learn everything", "there are no stupid people" and "having fun, building a good self-esteem and learning to respect others are the most important goals". This becomes evident in reality-based subjects that have objective standards, which tend to make intelligence differences too obvious to deny and therefore hurt the self-esteem of the bottom half of the bell curve. But then again, the whole point of having objective standards is to discriminate between right and wrong, correct and incorrect, smart and stupid. In other words, to acknowledge the existence of objective reality, which you can only deny so long no matter how "open-minded" and "understanding" you are. Even the most postmodernist and socially conscious leftist might feel a certain nasty tinge in her stomach if she knew that the surgeon who is about to operate on her has an IQ of 80 and a combined SAT score of 600. Crusading against standardized tests is basically crusading against objective reality itself. Once we remember that objective reality is the number one enemy of every social constructionist, we understand why standardized tests are so hysterically opposed.
Lose the fiction of everybody being the same and make it so that within the same school, there are completely separate tracks for students of different aptitudes, with students moving up and down according to their results. In fact, the schools themselves should specialize for different aptitude levels of students, in the exact same way that restaurants specialize for different wealth and gastronomical levels of their diners. With a more homogeneous student body, each school could teach its students optimally with material geared to their level. Of course, a handful of late-blossoming students would find the doors of higher education unfairly closed to them, but since for every misunderstood genius there are a hundred correctly understood morons, the total net result would be much better than the current system.
And of course, this is how it used to be in Finland before socialists decided that it is bad and unfair, because for some mysterious reason, a kid from a poor family who hates reading is not as likely to study in a university as a kid from a middle-class family who reads a lot. There must be some kind of bad and systematic discrimination going on, since such inequality of results cannot be explained in any other way! Thus first went the aptitude separation between schools, and then went the aptitude separation within schools, gradually leading to the disaster that is not even close to the current American situation where many high school graduates can't even read or write. But based on what I have read, we are slowly getting there.
At least the Finnish schools don't yet resemble war zones and require security guards and metal detectors. Speaking of which, I don't know what the discipline of the average junior high in USA or Canada is like these days, but that's one thing that I seriously can't understand: why do the teachers tolerate this? I'm pretty sure that if doctors, taxi drivers, janitors, policemen or members of any other profession had to encounter similar namecalling, disrespect, disobedience and threats of violence in their line of work, their unions would have already organized strikes and other such actions to remedy this. So why do the teacher's unions just meekly sit and accept every single idiotic change that only makes things worse? Why don't they stand up and say "That's freaking enough! We're mad as hell and we're not gonna take this any more!" Their members are able to see the change to worse with their own eyes, so why do their unions ignore their members and keep listening to few postmodern and relativist "educational theorists" who say that all grading and discipline is bad and what matters is whether the student grows up to be an individual with a good self-esteem? (Seriously, is there an advanced degree more useless and worthless than an Ed.D. ? Other than a degree in women's studies or home economics, of course.)
Second, I don't understand what's the big idea of forcing the little troublemakers to stay in school if they don't want to. We know perfectly well that the defiant little punks who constantly cause problems are not going to learn anything no matter how hard the teachers try to persuade them, and will only harm other students who are forced to spend their days with them. So why bother pretending that it would be otherwise? Just let these people go and be done with it: they have already learned what little they need to know to do the toilet cleaning and gas pumping jobs that they are going to do in adulthood.
In fact, if every single class purged about two or three of its worst-behaving students, I guarantee that these schools would suddenly massively improve without these troublemakers. Similarly, instead of high school diploma being some kind of a basic human right, high schools should massively limit their student intake to improve their overall quality. Perhaps something like one third of kids should start working after junior high, not going to high school at all. This little change would vastly improve the atmosphere and results of high schools, and save a lot of money while doing it. It is ridiculous to demand a high school diploma or a bachelor's degree for jobs that really require neither except as a signalling mechanism.
An English school successfully switched from age-based classes to skill-based classes.
Here is the report:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,1666778,00.html
Warning: Guardian is known as a leftist newspaper. Watch out so you won't get infected.
Posted by Simo | 4:01 PM
From talking to former teachers, I get the impression that teachers would love to be able to tell parents that their children are rotten little brats and/or dumb as posts but for a fear of lawsuits at every turn.
It is further discouraging that the professor I knew in college who complained most about her students were education professor.
Posted by Sean | 6:41 PM
The "No Child Left Behind" act lets the states test themselves and the states are clever enough to lower the test standards gradually so that they can show year to year improvement.
Posted by Anonymous | 9:54 PM
The reason why the American schools have students and graduates who cannot read and write is actually the opposite of the problem of the Finnish system: American high schools usually have different levels of classes for different students. In my high school, for example, there were five levels of math for each grade, and one could take the math classes of other grades too, if one wanted to. On one hand this had all the advantages that you have just described (everyone got the education they wanted and nobody had to be in the same class with losers unless they wanted to), and on the other hand the kids who never wanted to learn anything never did.
Posted by Vera | 6:25 AM