New report from Academy of Sciences questions reliance on standardized tests

The National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, has just issued a report that has been in the works for fifteen years. The authors looked at years of research related to standardized testing and incentive systems, including No Child Left Behind. A PDF summary of the study is available here.

While the authors of the study do not claim that incentives should never be used, they say that the research does not support the idea that increased incentives have led to improved learning.

Despite using them for several decades, policymakers and educators do not yet know how to use test-based incentives to consistently generate positive effects on achievement and to improve education. (summary, page 5)

They cite many arguments familiar to those who question the wisdom of relying too much on standardized tests. For example, they say that measuring the effects of a program should always be done with a test other than the one which is connected with the incentives. This is to prevent gaming the system, where teachers learn how to make scores go up on their state test, but scores on the national tests (such as NAEP) do not go up.

The summary is worth reading. You can also read about the study in this article from the Huffington Post. Here is a quote from study author Dan Ariely:

"It raises a red flag for education," Ariely said. "These policies are treating humans like rats in a maze. We keep thinking about how to reorganize the cheese to get the rats to do what we want. People do so much more than that."

This reductive thinking, Ariely said, is also responsible for spreading the notion that teachers are in the profession for the money. "That's one of the worst ideas out there," he said. "In the process of creating No Child Left Behind, as people thought about these strategies and rewards, they actually undermined teachers' motivations. They got teachers to care less, rather than more," he added, because "they took away a sense of personal achievement and autonomy."

Linda Darling-Hammond: If we want the U.S. to score like Finland and Singapore, lets make our education system like Finland and Singapore.

Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor at Stanford, was many people's choice for Secretary of Education. Unfortunately, Barack Obama went with his pal Arne Duncan. In this insightful article on the Washington Post blog "The Answer Sheet," Darling-Hammond explains how different our current reforms are from what the highest performing countries are doing.

She explains how the teacher bashing and union busting going on in our country right now is completely missing in high-performing countries such as Finland and Singapore. Instead, these countries support their teachers, give them lots of time to train and work together, and pay them top salaries.

The link is here.

Indiana's education leader makes up claims about teacher quality

In this post at a blog called School Matters, John Hinnefeld thoroughly debunks Tony Bennett's claim that teachers have twenty times more impact on student achievement than any other factor.

Hinnefeld and the other writer of the blog contacted one of the researchers associated with the study Bennett has cited, and they learned that Bennett basically made up that claim.

Read the whole piece here.

Anthony Cody sums up where we are

In this post at Education Week, Anthony Cody gives a concise summary of the main arguments of the pro-teacher side of the debate we are in.

He closes with this line:

This is a fight for the future of education in America, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. 

More About Finland

If you want to learn more about Finland's educational system, check out this list of resources from Larry Ferlazzo. He provides links to a number of news stories and interviews that give more details on how Finland educates its youth.

Finland's Education System

Justin Snider of the Hechinger Report interviews Pasi Sahlberg, who works for the Ministry of Education in Finland. Sahlberg gives his thoughts on the reform movement in the United States. He is mostly critical of the Bill Gates/Race to the Top/Merit Pay "reforms" that are taking over the U.S.

The best answer is this one:

The Hechinger Report: What are your thoughts on the use of value-added data to measure teacher performance, which is quite popular in the U.S. at the moment?

Sahlberg: It’s very difficult to use this data to say anything about the effectiveness of teachers. If you tried to do this in my country, Finnish teachers would probably go on strike and wouldn’t return until this crazy idea went away. Finns don’t believe you can reliably measure the essence of learning. You know, one big difference in thinking about education and the whole discourse is that in the U.S. it’s based on a belief in competition. In my country, we are in education because we believe in cooperation and sharing. Cooperation is a core starting point for growth.

Monty Neill on the value of experienced teachers

In this blog post, hosted by Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post, Monty Neill explains why there are problems with the claim that experienced teachers are not much better than inexperienced ones.

Test scores can't prove whether teacher experience matters