Instead of Standardized Tests, Why Not Build the World Wide Web?

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Cathy N. Davidson served from 1998 until 2006 as the first Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University. She is the co-founder of Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, HASTAC (“haystack”), a network of innovators dedicated to new forms of learning for the digital age. She is also co-director of the $2 million annual HASTAC/John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition. She is the author of  20 books. She was appointed by President Obama to the National Council on the Humanities in 2011.

Everything we know about high-stakes, end-of-grade testing confirms that: (1) it only matches with and measures about 20% of the actual content a child learns in school;  (2) it really measures one's parents' income or education, not one's own achievement, knowledge, and intelligence; (3) you can "scam" any test result by taking extra prep work in "how to take this particular form of test"--which means that, in order to save their kids' future, their schools, and, in some states, their salaries and even their jobs, teachers have to "teach to the test" which means you are then teaching content to a test that is itself poor and content-poor; (4) the test measures a very narrow range not just of content but of thinking--no logical thinking, no inference, no experiential thinking, very little crossdisciplinary thinking:  "item response" really does mean learning by item and "one best answer" really means that the world shrinks to a few choices from which you choose the best:  nothing else in life works in such a way, with knowledge parsed into discreet bubbles and given to you as a series of simple options from which you select the best; (5) it leaves out so much about knowledge that is important--intuition, creativity, inspiration, originality so to make it the one end of all knowledge (even college entrance) is a disaster; and (6) the test itself de-motivates kids and teachers from real learning.  Oh, and (7): It isn't cheap anymore.  Making and grading and administering standardized tests costs each state tens and even hundreds of millions each year. 

10 Ways to Assess Without Standardized Tests

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Lisa Nielsen writes for and speaks to audiences across the globe about learning innovatively. She has worked for more than a decade in various capacities to support learning in real and innovative ways that will prepare students for success. Her book is Teaching Generation Text, and her award-winning blog The Innovative Educator.

Standardized tests are not what's best for learning. Not only are they not best for learning, but they have become an insurmountable obstacle for innovative educators like me to do my work in schools because helping kids become good and filling in bubbles on a piece of paper is anything but innovative!

Unfortunately, many politicians, parents, and even students don’t know a world without testing and wonder...

“If we don't use standardized tests how will we measure learning, teacher effectiveness, or school effectiveness?”

When people ask me that question, I usually respond with this question:

“How do we assess learning in real life?”

Disobey

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Johnny B. Truant is an entrepreneur and an unschooling dad with an awesome website. In this post he writes about his decision to finally take the plunge to unschool his son Austin. He deeply delves into his reasons for "disobeying" society and choosing to go his own way with his family. (if you are sensitive to profanity, please do not read)

School starts today. Not for my son Austin, though.

Johnny and his son, Austin

I’m finishing writing this at 6am. At a little before 8am, the school bus is going to pull up in front of our house, and because we just got around to notifying the district that we’re not doing the school thing this year, the bus driver won’t know and will honk. I’ll be working. Austin will be asleep. The dogs will go nuts, because the dogs always seem to go nuts when such things happen.

Then the bus will go away and sometime later Austin will wake up, and we’ll hang out and maybe watch a science show on TV or something. Afterward, we’ll do our normal Wednesday thing, which is going to my gym, then to Target to window-shop the new toys, then to Chipotle for lunch. He’ll spend the afternoon drawing and reading these old, used Mario Bros books I got for him on Amazon (or possibly browsing the Mario Bros wiki — noticing a trend here?). He may play a game with me (I’m working on both The Sims and Sim City), play outside, or opt for some actual Mario Bros on the Wii.

What do we Teach Our Kids?

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Johnny B. Truant is an entrepreneur and an unschooling dad with an awesome website. He writes this post when he was first becoming intrigued with unschooling but wasn't doing it yet. In it he questions what schools teach children and lists what he thinks are important things to teach children which doesn't really mesh with what school teaches. Now he unschools, loves it, and couldn't imagine any other way. (if you are sensitive to profanity, please do not read)

I’ve heard that talking about parenting can fetch you a bunch of caustic feedback, but I’m going to do it anyway.

My son Austin is five. The kid is brilliant. I know that all parents think their kids are smart, but this is no joke.

Austin knows how to do the basics of multiplication and division. His vocabulary rivals mine (“celtic punk” and “pneumatic tube” were probably among the first 100 phrases he learned, no joke). And for some reason, out of the aether, he’s got this fantastic artistic ability. The other day he was copying a detailed illustration out of one of his Transformers books (it was a plane air-dropping Optimus Prime into battle) and was doing it freehand, without tracing, and did a better job than when Robin tries to draw stuff at his request.

DIY Learning: Schoolers, Edupunks, and Makers Challenge Education As We Know it

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A ton of links for DIY learners. A valuable post. Marie Bjerede is a writer, speaker, and champion for education transformation. With her wireless communication background, she's now challenging technical, economic, social, and systemic obstacles.

Create, disassemble, repurpose! DIY-ers relentlessly void warranties and crack manufacturers' cases, showing us what is possible when people decide that they, not the vendors, truly own the technology they have purchased. "If you can't open it, you don't own it," the Make Owner's Manifesto tells us.

This DIY ethic is now seeping into one of the most locked-down social institutions in existence: education. Educators, parents, technologists, students, and others have begun looking at the components, subassemblies, assemblies and specifications of excellent education and are finding ways to improve, reimagine, and reinvent learning at every level.

They are inspired by a multiplicity of sources, from neuroscience to gaming, to knock down the barriers to learning that exist for so many young people. In every way, they are looking at the components of teaching and learning, and finding ways to re-create them to be more efficient; more effective; and, critically, more modular.

Doing More Time in School: A Cruel Non-Solution to Our Educational Problems

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Peter Gray is an American psychologist and now professor emeritus at Boston College. He is the author of a widely-used introductory psychology textbook, Psychology, currently in its sixth edition. He is currently writing a blog, titled Freedom to Learn . You can read this original article here.

School doesn’t work very well, so let’s make kids do more of it!

That seems to be the policy enthusiastically supported by President Obama, by his education secretary Arne Duncan, by many teachers’ unions (as long as the teachers are well paid for the extra time), and by many education policy makers in and out of academia.

Kids aren’t learning much in school, so let’s make them start school when they are younger; let’s make them stay more hours in school each day and more days each year; and let’s not allow them to leave until they are at least 18 years old. Let’s do all this especially to the poor kids; they are getting the least out of school now, so let’s lengthen their time in school even more than we lengthen the time for others! 

School is Bad for Children

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By John Holt originally published in The Saturday Evening Post, February 8, 1969. What a beautiful and honest portrayal of school. 

Almost every child, on the first day he sets foot in a school building, is smarter, more curious, less afraid of what he doesn't know, better at finding and figuring things out, and more confident, resourceful, persistent and independent than he will ever be again in his schooling - or, unless he is very unusual and very lucky, for the rest of his life.

Already, by paying close attention to and interacting with the world and people around him, and without any school-type formal instruction, he has done a task far more difficult, complicated and abstract than anything he will be asked to do in school, or than any of his teachers has done for years. He has solved the mystery of language. He has discovered it - babies don't even know that language exists - and he has found out how it works and learned to use it. He has done it by exploring, by experimenting, by developing his own model of the grammar of language, by trying it out and seeing whether it works, by gradually changing it and refining it until it does work. And while he has been doing this, he has been learning other things as well, including many of the "concepts" that the schools think only they can teach him, and many that are more complicated than the ones they do try to teach him.

Concerns That Every Parent Should Understand Before They Send Their Children to School

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By unschooling mother Tamala Takahashi

Maybe you’re counting the days until your little one will finally be going to school. Maybe your 4, 5, or 6 year old is also waiting on bated breath to hear school bells telling them to go to class or to bring home homework assignments to do together as a family every night at the dinner table, with smiles and laughter, eating s’mores.

But there is a reality to school that few people talk about. There is a cultural fantasy about the beauty of public school, that once kids go to school, they shall learn, and be free, and grow up to be upstanding citizens. And every year, children all over the United States strap on their backpacks for the first time, and start their first school day in their 12 or 13 year long educational career.

15 Secrets of the Most Successful Self-Learners

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Justin W. Marquis, Ph.D., is a blogger for Online Universities’ education news, technology, and lifestyle blog. He currently teaches educational technology at the undergraduate and graduate levels. His publications include work on the changing nature of learning, the use of video games in education, and the ways in which technological literacy affects the Digital Divide. The original article can be found here.

For many curious folks, their impassioned yearning to soak up as much of the world’s wonders as possible completely transcends the boundaries of a traditional classroom. Armed with an insatiable lust for knowledge, they set out to acquire it on their own terms, although a few pointers obviously can’t hurt before departure and landing! Not every possible technique will necessarily stick with all self-motivated learners, of course, but the only way to find out is to test them. Try some of the following and experiment with what works in a more independent educational setting.

1. Take advantage of open source or courseware
Learn for free via resources like iTunes U, YouTube EDU, Open Culture, MIT Open Courseware, and many, many more examples of open source and courseware. These free (or low-cost, in some cases) offerings provide everything from overviews to entire classes for self-motivated learners wanting to pick up pretty much any subject imaginable.

Re-discovered Research Says Early School Starting Age 'Harms Children'

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By Catharine Gaunt. Did you know that formal education at too early of an age can contribute to dying early?! This is very convincing evidence to forgo school for our young children. The original post can be read here.

Dr. Richard House

A leading education campaigner and child psychologist is calling on the Prime Minister to intervene in the ongoing debate about the age at which children should start school.

Dr Richard House, a co-founder of the Open Eye and Early Childhood Action movements, said that there is now sufficient evidence that an early school starting age is bad for children.

He is calling for the revised EYFS to be made voluntary and for the school starting age to be raised.

Speaking at the Westminster Education Forum in London today, Dr House will argue that research proves that formal learning at too early an age, rather than leading to children doing well at school, actually leads to lower academic performance and can even contribute to dying early.

53% of Recent College Grads are Jobless or Unemployed - How?

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Jordan Weissmann is an associate editor at The Atlantic. He has written for a number of publications, including The Washington Post and The National Law Journal.

More than half of America's recent college graduates are either unemployed or working in a job that doesn't require a bachelor's degree, the Associated Press reported this weekend. The story would seem to be more evidence that, regardless of your education, the wake of the Great Recession has been a terrible time to be young and hunting for work. 

But are we really becoming another Greece or Spain, a wasteland of opportunity for anybody under the age of 25? Not quite. What the new statistics really tell us about is the changing nature, and value, of higher education.

A Moment of Doubt

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Jennifer is a full-time unschooling mom, a future yoga teacher, and a part-time writer. She lives in Phoenix with her husband, four kids, and an ever-growing variety of winged, scaled, and furry pets. She loves exploring in the desert, baking cupcakes, and a really good cup of coffee. She blogs (semi) regularly at www.jennifermcgrail.com.

The room was nearly silent. The awkwardness was palpable. Even the speech therapist … bubbly, outgoing and friendly until just a few weeks prior, absolutely refused to look us in the eye, instead staring down at some imaginary spot on the table. I remember looking at the clock – a standard issue, one-in-every-room school clock – and watching the second hand slowly sweep around until I heard the audible click that signified that another excruciatingly long minute had gone by.

There were five of us gathered around the table: my husband and me, a speech therapist, an occupational therapist, and some sort of head of the special education department. We were there to discuss the next course of action for our then four-year-old first child. He’d started to resist their recommended therapies, crying at every session. They were strongly recommending a special needs preschool, and were in visible disagreement when we declined. They thought he was too attached to me, and that I needed to “be strong” and let him go.

It wasn’t destined to be a happy meeting of the minds.

Just Do the Math!

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An excerpt from Have Fun. Learn Stuff. Grow: Homeschooling and the Curriculum of Love by David H Albert.  In this article David writes how Dan Greenberg, founder of the Sudbury Valley school, taught a group of a dozen boys and girls, ages 9-12, the entire K-6 math portfolio in 20 contact hours. 

A group of homeschooling mothers gathered together in a circle to discuss unschooling approaches to their children’s education.

 “Not possible,” homeschool mom proclaimed glumly, shaking her head.

 I had just explained how the Sudbury Valley School - a democratically managed, child-directed learning environment that has been around for almost 40 years - has demonstrated repeatedly that a child could learn math - all of it grades K through 12 - in eight weeks. Average (if there is such a thing), normal (never met one), healthy children, hundreds of them, learned it all, leading to admissions to some of the leading colleges and universities in the nation.

Nine Dangerous Things You Were Taught in School

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Jessica Hagy uses visuals to tell stories, jokes and truths. Jessica is an artist and writer best known for her award-winning blog, Indexed. A fixture in the creative online space, Jessica has been illustrating, consulting, and speaking since 2006.

Be aware of the insidious and unspoken lessons you learned as a child. To thrive in the world outside the classroom, you’re going to have to unlearn them.

Unschooling as a Political Activity

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This is a brilliant article by Camy Matthay.

Parents homeschool their children in America for many reasons, but the initial motive is generally protective -against an environment they see as unable to conform to their convictions about how children should be raised and educated.  For the most part, homeschooling parents on the political right homeschool their children to protect them from ideas and values that conflict with their religious beliefs, whereas homeschooling parents on the left are motivated by the desire to protect their children from an environment they foresee as incompatible with creative life.

          I am on the left end of the spectrum; to have expected my children to spend the best hours of their childhood in relative confinement from life would have been the worst sort of hypocrisy on my part -a violation of the Golden Rule.  Moreover, given the fact that my own experience in school had restrained my thinking while falsely inflating my ego, it was impossible for me to pretend that my children, even if they were ranked among the "gifted and talented," could survive the schooling experience ethically unscathed.