Straight-faced story in the Chronicle, out here in San Francisco: the California Superintendent of Education, a hack named O’Connell who harbors additional political ambitions, and don’t they all, announces that the imposition of the ‘Exit Exam’ on high school students is a rousing success! Because the scores are improving. Really.
I love Jack O’Connell, I do, because he’s a wonderful example of just how far beneath contempt the state’s educational bureaucracy has become. It is a closed system of supreme illogic, people with fat salaries chasing their own tails.
Over the decades since the ‘sixties, California’s high schools have steadily gone to rot. At some point, this became obvious, and so the thing became a political issue. But pols, being often venal as well as slow-witted, were loathe to spend actual cash on education, having already gotten beneath the sheets with the prison industry, agribusiness, and other heavy commercial hitters, and were thus looking for a cheap fix.
The cheap fix is standardized testing, zero tolerance, and the elimination of frills, such as art and music programs, civics, and the development of critical thinking. To see how well this has worked, just look out the bloody window.
There are serious long-term consequences of this madness, some of which I’ve mentioned in earlier ravings, and the subject is worth a lengthy diatribe –– I’m fooling around with notes for a book –– but it’s enough here to note only the stunning idiocy which equates rising test scores with improved education.
It works this way. Let’s say that I’m in charge of education (there are people I know who would pass out at the prospect), and I want to set it up so that you think I’m doing a swell job. I declare that nobody will graduate unless they can pass a test I’m going to give them.
The test is devised and administered. Results come in. They show that a certain percentage of students are able to memorize a certain percentage of factoids and regurgitate them in test form. I follow this up by tweaking the test and pounding hard at the factoids. Scores get better. See, wasn’t that easy?
Nobody seems to notice the irrelevancy of the factoids to real life and real life skills. Also, nobody notices that a test may be manipulated from year to year to render it easier or harder to pass. I can get ‘better’ scores anytime I want them just by fiddling the materials.
The concept of awarding diplomas only to those who pass an exam is inherently crazy because the only way anybody will buy it is if some people fail. And by composing a test of a particular degree of difficulty, I can guarantee that the failure percentage will be anything I want it to be.
If everyone passed, the test would be considered invalid. If everyone failed, the test would be considered invalid. Only with a pre-determined failure rate can I prop-up the fakery, but luckily it’s entirely in my own hands.
What O’Connell and his jolly crew do not talk about are the rates of high school suicide, drop-outs, clinical depression, vandalism, and drug and alcohol abuse. Teachers report an epidemic of cheating. Well, what the fuck did anybody expect?
The ‘philosophy’ which underlies this approach to education is the functional equivalent of the notion that beating slaves improves their morale. Nobody questions the premise, although it is the premise which is fatally incorrect. On a national level, Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, buys the same premise. The damage this will cause in the future cannot be overestimated.
Learning does not take place when a student is under tremendous stress. That is not a new idea. Real educators have always known this. But we are a culture which has gone into overdrive, pushing harder and harder at an ever-narrower idea of ‘success.’ We see it in sports, where high school athletes, especially football players, are doping themselves to add muscle mass –– I had an interesting conversation a few days ago with a Redwood High student who knows the jocks –– and we see it in academia, where kids are cheating during the week and drinking themselves insensate on the weekends.
But the scores are improving. Just ask Jack O’Connell.
