Race to the Top?

The article "Is Academic Overachievement Hurting our Kids" raises questions about the impact of both the competitive achievement and high stakes testing cultures that have come to characterize how we measure, place value on, and offer opportunity to our young people. The title answers the question: over achievement by definition implies too much of something. If the question were posed as, "Is underachievement hurting our kids?" there would be little to argue about. The better questions have to do with what we mean by achievement, what we mean by standards, how we measure such things, and what effect those measurements have on kids and on the larger society.

Grades, especially numeric averages, are primarily useful for sorting; they sort, first, the kids who behave in a way to that produces high numerical grades from those who do not. Exacerbated by college admissions systems that place ever-greater emphasis on micro-distinctions between numerical ratings, many kids become "high-achievers." Without being too flip, Wall St., Washington DC, and our health care system might be offered as evidence that the measures for sorting and providing employment to high achievers has little overall benefit to society (though it clearly has economic benefit to the folks who come out on top.)

Standardized tests are not nearly as damaging to kids as numerical grades - in fact, properly used as data sources that inform strategies such as "assessment for learning," they can be invaluable. The problem is in the substitution of such data for all other measures. In implementation, they become rigid, limiting, decontextualized lists which systems and teachers then feel forced to teach to. NCLB's promise was that, after years of well-intentioned "reform," (what GW Bush, or more likely his speechwriters, referred to as, "the soft tyranny of low expectations") there was finally some teeth in the proposition that schools needed to try to teach ALL kids well. Unfortunately, achieving such limited-scope data gains became the means by which schools, principals, and now, if Arne Duncan has his way, individual teachers are assessed.

This approach squeezes out all of the other aptitudes and accomplishments that not only are not measured by such tests, but that thrive in opposition to such narrow definitions of human learning and capacity. Traits like curiosity and creativity that underlie all genuine great achievement, or skills like problem-solving in context that enable students to not just pass tests, but to understand the value of and applications for the concepts they're being tested on, become a luxury.

MFES' position is this:
High standards are necessary for ALL students, and measurement of those standards is crucial to effective teaching and learning. But numerical grades and standardized test are at best, a small part of that. How do we teach, hold students to, and measure standards of perseverance in the face of hardship? How do we teach, hold students to, and measure standards that determine when the media, or food, or energy they consume is good for them and their fellow citizens or not? How do we teach, hold students to, and measure standards that enable them to recognize that while competition is good, the numbers game is just that, a game...a race to a dubious top that in practice leaves a lot of trampled, battered competitors who often end up deciding that since they can't win such a race, they might as well give up.