In any society some degree of
standardization is necessary to maintain unity and a consistent base. But when it comes to education do we really
want to standardize our students' minds?
Like any typical U.S. education, my educational career is constantly
falling in and out of different degrees of standardization, and my recent four
hour battle with the GRE graduate exam has left me a little wounded and highly
critical. I’m not naïve, I understand
that with about twenty one million students enrolled in an American college or
university this fall, a standard for comparison makes things easier. However, to quote The Princeton Review book, “the GRE provides a valid assessment of
only one thing… how well you take the GRE”,
yet it, along with other standardized tests, is taken insanely seriously; GEPA,
HESPA, SAT, ACT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, GMAT … you get the point. Sadly, standardized tests are punctuations to
years of standardized education that seem to encourage conformity and
complacency.
The problem isn't as much
standardized tests as it is the obsession and emphasis placed on it by schools teaching
to the test and evaluating students primarily based on the results of these exams. In his interview with U.S. News, cognitive
psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman said that he’s not “anti-IQ or
anti-standardized tests” but that he’s “against standardizing minds and ignoring the fact that there
are multiple paths to the same outcome”.
In their essay “Reckoning with
Standards”, Susan Leigh Star and Martha Lampland talk about standards in general
and that “[they] are not, in any sense, against standardization- only against
society’s romance with it.” Like Kaufman,
Star, and Lampland, I’m not full out against standardized test, but that it
should be a supplement and not what we design our schooling around, because a one-size-fits-all
style of education isn't going to fit anybody*.
In
my lifetime alone I've watched (and experienced in the public school system)
Bush’s No Child Left Behind and
Obama’s Race to the Top attempt centralize
and standardize our schools. Huffington
Post’s Fred Bauer worries that these types of reforms “could lead to an even
more homogenized classroom by incentivizing testing and evaluation on a few
subjects”, reducing education down to standardized test performances. No
Child Left Behind and Race to the Top
set up standardized testing essentially to quantify student’s level of
education, “measuring-standardizing activity is often the only thing that
people consider ‘real evidence of results’.
It is a failure of imagination to believe this,” according to Star and Lampland.
In his Scientific American blog post “Standardized
Achievement Tests: What Are They Good For? Hint: Not Cognitive Ability” Kaufman
notes that while it’s known that “good
standardized test takers also tend to have high cognitive ability…growth in standardized test performance doesn't buy us: cognitive ability.” Nevertheless, we so badly want to
statistically evaluate education and cognition, even if it’s counter-productive,
that we ignore the ramifications, or worse, we try to fix it with more tests,
as if the glitches will just work themselves out. We live in an era where theoretically children
have so many opportunities to expand and diversify their knowledge, yet we
constrict them to certain measurements in an attempt to streamline the
process.
*Interpreted from Star and Lampland’s
comment regarding standards in general to fit standards in education
specifically, they said “work must get must get done, even though one size
never fits all.”
http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2013/07/05/the-problem-with-standardized-tests-in-education
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/2013/12/20/standardized-achievement-tests-what-are-they-good-for-hint-not-cognitive-ability/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/fred-bauer/a-conservative-critique-o_b_1214995.html
Star and Lampland essay "Reckoning with Standards" from the book Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life
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