Academic Criticism Desperately Needed in Education No comments yet

Like most administrators, I’m using Winter Break to get caught up on my professional reading.  During the first 4 months of the school year, I take all of the publications from the various associations that I belong to and scour them for nuggets of information that are valuable.  Sometimes I find a good website, a quote or a new thought that I can really use.  Most of the time, however, I just get upset by the lack of thoughtfulness (deep thinking really) that exists in many of the most broadly distributed periodicals.  I really can’t fault the authors, the editors shouldn’t let some of this material out there, or should push for more academic thinking.

I found an interesting article The Advanced Ed Source which is a publication of NCA CASI.  The article was written by Dr. Yong Zhao, who hails from Michigan State Univ. and is the founding Director of the Center for Teaching and Technology and the US Center for Research on Educational Excellence.  The point of his article is that the U.S. has had an advantage in the world because of our ability to innovate and be creative.  Zhao warns that excessive emphasis on testing will kill this ability and strip us of an economic advantage.  He points to several Asian economic powers who are stepping back from their “test score” centric approaches and moving towards fostering innovation and creativity.  Here’s the rub.  Just because these countries are backing off of testing, doesn’t mean that we should.  In Japan, there is a virtual industry of “Cram Schools”.  Solely designed to help students take national assessments.  Assessment/testing in Japan is grueling and there is extensive evidence that students are phenomenally stressed out by the testing.  I don’t think that the same argument can be said here.  Sure, there are plenty of students who are stressed by their ACT scores, but as a national epidemic of test anxiety, we are not even on the same plane as Japan.

The issue isn’t that he is right or wrong.  It is that there is no venue for a discussion.  His thoughts and analysis will be promulgated throughout the country as the most divine wisdom by speakers and professional developers looking for the latest gig.  There is plenty of interest in innovation by the business world (whose lobbyists helped bring us NCLB in the first place).  Sadly, there won’t be a debate.  There’s plenty of room on this one.  For example:

• We have entire urban districts where more than 70% of the students don’t meet their state standards (which are often pretty weak anyway).  We need to fix these situations first, and then worry about creativity.
• I suspect that we have ample creativity, it is part of our culture.  Let’s maintain our strengths and work on our weaknesses rather than chase around other countries who have vastly different cultures.

Just a little academic debate.  That’s what I’m looking for.  In higher ed. there would be some debate.  In K-12, we don’t have it.  Sure, we have the age old reading wars and ELL wars, but there is so much more that needs to be covered.  We don’t have forums for this in K-12 and we need them.  How can we get them started?

What do you think?