In this insightful interview, Peter Sacks, the author of Standardized Minds, discusses his take on the NCLB Act and its consequences for the future of our public schools and our nation's children.

 

JSC: How do you think your experiences in journalism and economics have influenced your interpretations of educational controversies?

PS: I think I have approached these questions from a social science perspective, that is, one which relies on data and evidence to support or not support public policies toward education. I think I'm a fairly rational person, and I'm baffled and angered when irrational and counterproductive public policies are enacted upon those without political and economic power for the sake of corporate profits and political ambition. I can't deny that my views and methods in my writing about education are also informed heavily by my sense of social and economic justice. As a journalist, I have always had a healthy mistrust of those with political and economic power who spew rhetoric about what's good for everyone else. And when you scratch the surface it so happens that what's supposedly in the public good is a neat cover story for policies that really benefit certain private interests. So I'm not the typical economist—or journalist, for that matter.

JSC: What have been some of the more encouraging (and/or discouraging!) responses to Standardized Minds?

PS: I've been gratified by the intensely positive response I have received from many educators, parents and others across the country who believe in the book. But my book has not yet reached the mainstream audience I had hoped for. So far, the book seems to have done little to stop the insane policies that pass these days as "education reform." As a writer and thinker, I often feel very alone and marginalized, making noises and drawing attention to injustices and irrationalities that few people seem willing to hear. I'm hopeful things will change when people start to get angry about the hypocrisy of policies enacted in the name of helping their children.

JSC: What do you see as some positive or negative ramifications of our No Child Left Behind Act?

PS: Where does one begin? This law has been an unmitigated disaster for our schools and school children, and for public education in general. Standardized Minds came out before NCLB was enacted, but the book essentially foretold its existence. NCLB is a culmination, the logical endpoint of a certain way of thinking about schools that began with A Nation at Risk in 1983.

NCLB is an Orwellian triumph of technocracy, of measurement over substance, of illusion over reality, of corporate culture over a human-centered one. NCLB is of a piece of our recent political and economic history in general, where ordinary people are the losers and the winners are corporations and political hacks.

JSC: What interests do you observe driving the push for testing? What makes specific interests difficult to challenge?

PS: I'm now convinced that NCLB, by its very design, was conceived and created in an extreme ideological hothouse whose practitioners and wizards hold that the only way the American public will buy into privatizing public schools is to make schools and teachers out to be utter failures, so designated by means of a testing and accountability system in which it is virtually impossible for them to succeed. The educational neocons, of course, are banking on so many school failures such that public educational assets will be spun off into the private sector. Ultimately, local property owners, via their property taxes, will be called on to fund the testing requirements of NCLB as well as the educational entrepreneurs and private school management firms that will profit from the law.

JSC: What specific American factors make it difficult to raise questions about popular buzz terms in education—whether discussing "standards,""assessment," "accountability"—or even NCLB?

PS: I fear Americas are easily swayed by pseudo-science. If something can be measured, however ineptly, like student learning, then it's worth measuring, however ineptly. I'm constantly asked, "What would you do instead to hold schools accountable?" The very question presumes a particular paradigm about human learning and development that I find objectionable. Accountable for what? For spoon-feeding children dumbed-down, incoherent facts that they can repeat on a standardized test? To show future employers how compliant an individual is? What are schools for in a democratic society? To serve the needs of the individual? Or to serve corporate interests? To reinforce existing inequalities of race and class and provide the best educational experiences to the children of the best educated parents?

Have you ever noticed how schools continue to offer the most enriching learning experiences to the children of educated, affluent parents, the parents who have the most clout? Have you noticed how the testing and accountability movement seems to most dumb down the learning experiences of the poor, recent immigrants and children of color?

JSC: Multiple choice testing, as you have noted, is often justified as"cheap" or cost-effective. What are the insidious, humanistic costs which can accumulate?

PS: One useful tool my economics training taught me is that true costs aren't necessarily reflected in the accounting costs, the costs that show up on the balance sheets in state or federal budgets. Industrial pollution is the classic example of firms shifting production costs onto society in terms of damages to the environment that are not reflected in the price consumers ultimately pay. Such "external costs" plague the standards and accountability movement as well, and state and federal policymakers are oblivious to them. They don't want to hear about it. But the research literature is quite clear about the true, off-the-books social costs and effects of the high-stakes testing movement.

By creating their overly simplistic school "accountability systems," policymakers have failed miserably to anticipate the consequences of those systems. Classrooms are being transformed into test preparation and drilling enterprises aimed solely at improving test scores in a rather narrow band of subject matter. This kind of so called "teaching" comes at great cost. What is lost when achievement is so narrowly defined? What is lost when teachers don't linger on subjects in any detail and depth because they're busy drilling kids on facts?

I'll tell you what is lost. You get a demoralized teaching force. You get a de-skilled, de-professionalized teachers who lose the capacity to make informed, professional judgments about the best course of action for particular students. You get students bored out of their minds with school because, contrary to what politicians believe, standardized tests do not motivate students to learn. You get students who don't really understand the material and able to apply it in useful ways. You get students who can't think critically—who can't apply factual information learned for tests to real world endeavors.

Judging by our most recent history, it would seem that a largely apathetic or uninformed public is basically OK with their children growing up to become unthinking, hyperconsumeristic automatons of the State—because that's the mindset that policies like No Child Left Behind engenders and rewards.

JSC: In California and many other states, at the end of a yearly test cycle national and local newspapers publish multiple-page layouts of test data—indices, rankings, percentiles, abbreviations—all in massive tables which resemble NYSE, NASDAQ—even sports listings. What are some effects of portraying education this way? How does this narrative of numbers inevitably confine debates about what is "positive" or "destructive" in education?

PS: The way politicians think about schools, they might as well fire all the teachers and educators and hire auditors and accountants just to make sure schools meet their so-called performance objectives. When politicians create something like the API in California, the Annual Performance Index, which is defined almost exclusively by schools' test scores, they're saying schools are like banks or publicly traded stocks. You look at capital ratios and percentage of non-performing loans and plug the numbers into a computer that spits out numbers telling you the financial condition of the bank and if the numbers don't meet the targets, the banks are subject to a takeover by the state.

Of course, schools are different than banks or publicly traded stocks. But some of these politicians don't care what actually goes on inside the schools, or the complexities of real learning. Unfortunately, the public, the press, even the real estate agents get sucked into this foolhardy game when all those data tables of school test scores get published in the paper. The sad part is, those tables really say almost nothing about school performance and almost everything about the social and economic conditions in which a particular school operates. The test scores are quite useful in that sense—they are thinly veiled codes for designating schools that serve affluent, well-educated families versus those that serve the rest.

JSC: Educators often consider the "Honors," "Gifted," or "AP" student population as the "best and brightest" we have. Yet in recent years, I noticed that I often had the most depressing task in those classes: Needing to justify curiosity and depth over glib certainty or mere accomplishment of grades. What does it say about our system if it most successfully culminates in the creation of students who desire only to learn if they're tested or given points by a teacher?

PS: What you describe is one of the most insidious effects of the general cultural belief in test scores as being equivalent to real learning for understanding and genuine accomplishment. The adults have put so much stock in SAT scores and the like as proxies for educational quality that the kids have gotten the message, loud and clear. Of course, some kids and some kinds of minds thrive in such an environment, but many others with different kinds of minds do not. We need to create a new paradigm of merit, one based on evidence of actual accomplishment and performance on endeavors of substance.

JSC: What are you reading? What books—on any subject—might you recommend to those working in education?

PS: I'm doing a lot of reading and thinking about the nature of social class and our education system, and this will likely be the subject of my next book. I'm reading a book from the 1960s, "On Equality of Educational Opportunity," a series of papers edited by Frederick Mosteller and Daniel P. Moynihan about the Coleman Report, which is still worth reading for insights about the turn that social and educational policy has taken in recent years. I would recommend anybody concerned with the current direction of public education take a look at a little book called The Aims of Education, published in 1929 by the mathematician Alfred North Whitehead. His is a great example of an esteemed thinker taking up real, pragmatic issues about public education, and I wish more scientists today would take the time to do the same.

JSC: What would you like to see American schools doing in the next ten years? What do you imagine will actually happen?

PS: Of course, I would like to see state and local school systems engaged in outright revolt against such federal interventions into schools as the No Child Left Behind Act. I would like to see schools re-focus their efforts on school children and learning, and turn test-driven schools into learning-driven schools. In Standardized Minds, I go to great lengths trying to explain the difference and the sort of magical things that can happen in schools when teachers are given the latitude to really teach for understanding instead of teaching for the next high-stakes test. Standardized tests are actually good for some things—for measuring broad educational trends. They are virtually useless as classroom tools or tools for helping individual students. Until NCLB is repealed or significantly modified, schools will be under the yoke of the testing imperative, and parents and taxpayers can kiss genuine school improvement good-bye until then.

JSC: Describe your ideal alternative to multiple choice assessments of learning. How might this alternative be workable or unworkable under current conditions?

PS: Of course public schools should be held accountable to the public. But I'm asking: Held accountable for what? For higher test scores? Is that it?

I'm saying that's too low a standard and further, it's a false standard, one without much meaning. Schools should be held accountable for ensuring that students are achieving at high levels. I'm saying standardized tests can't possibly measure up to the job.

We should hold schools accountable for something meaningful. For outcomes that have a real connection to the American economy and the productivity of citizens in a democracy. That demands citizens with creative, intelligent, critical minds—not standardized minds.

How do we do make schools accountable? Let's measure outcomes that really matter. For example, we could measure how well schools do at getting kids to succeed in college prep programs. Rigor of one's course of study in high school is the single best predictor of success in college. We could measure how well schools perform at getting their graduates into college. That's a measure that matters because the rate at which a nation's citizens get higher education is perhaps the single best way to enhance a nation's economic productivity. We could assess how well high school students can actually perform on a real world project in which they have to apply their math and language skills. For example, instead of making students pass a standardized test to graduate, have them successfully complete a high school project under the supervision of a committee of teachers and community members and cap the accomplishment in a public demonstration event.

Once you start assessing learning this way, you begin to engage students in learning in a way that is almost never achieved with test-driven classrooms. Young learners begin to see the importance of the math and language basics as TOOLS—as a means to a useful end rather than the end itself.

Test driven classrooms are telling our kids that learning facts and formulas and being able to solve narrowly structured problems is good enough. Sorry, but it's not good enough. The real world isn't that simple. School children deserve nothing less.

JSC: When you think of teachers who impacted your growth as a thinking person, what qualities or characteristics made the most vivid or lasting impression? Why do you think contemporary educational institutions do/don't demand such qualities in their teachers?

PS: I recall my high school English teacher, Mr. Robert Kohn, at a Seattle-area high school where I went in the early 1970s. Mr. Kohn operated from virtually no syllabus. There was no standard curriculum that the state required him to teach. And of course, there was certainly no state-mandated standardized test he or his bosses were required to give us to determine whether we were competent in English or whether he was competent as a teacher. He gave me books, suggested I read and think about the books, and then he asked me to write, write, write. He gave me room to think! Frankly, I can't imagine learning anything worthwhile or memorable had Mr. Kohn been required to teach me junk knowledge and junk facts for some standardized test. I can't imagine great teachers like Mr. Kohn even existing in the mechanistic, test-driven schools that kids encounter these days. I can't imagine becoming a writer or a thinker myself had I been required to go through a school system like we demand kids go through nowadays.

JSC: What gives you hope—or, at least, encouragement—about American schools?

PS: American pragmatism gives me hope. Our general sense that if something's not working, then we should stop throwing good money after bad. American individuality gives me hope. In a society where the individual holds primacy, policies that threaten individual freedom, creativity and discovery make for a poor cultural fit. I'm starting to sound like a Libertarian—which I'm not—but I do also think that Americans have natural mistrust of government power, and we are suspicious of heavy-handed federal intervention into matters, such as public schools, that would seem to be better handled at the local level. So that tendency of Americans also gives me hope in the long run. But, as Keynes warned us, in the long run we're all dead. So we better get moving.

©2004 Jo Scott Coe

You may read a review of Peter Sack's book Standardized Minds: The High Price of America's Testing Culture and What We Can Do To Change It here.

About the Author: Currently on leave from teaching high school English, Jo Scott Coe is a grad student at the University of California, Riverside. She recently completed a screenplay titled No Child Left Behind (Boil the Frogs Slowly).