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Tuesday, May 06, 2008
The Achievement Test Challenge
Posted by The Dean of Cincinnati
I’d like to issue the “achievement test challenge” to area citizens, leaders, activists, and politicians. The premise will be simple: participants will take a variety of practice tests, like those given at both the 8th and 10th grade years. Answer documents will be anonymous, and the overall scores of the group will be collected and compared to student performance in Ohio. What better way to assess the utility of these high-stakes tests?
Check out this question:
By what process is energy transferred when sound waves travel through air?
A. absorption of sound waves by surfaces
B. vibrations of perpendicular electric and magnetic fields
C. flow of air currents away from the sound source to the listener
D. consecutive, repeating collisions or interactions of air particles
That question is for an 8th grader, from ODE’s published practice test.
Maybe it’s because I’m not a Science teacher. Maybe it’s because, at 33 years old, I just can’t remember 8th grade Science class very clearly anymore. But somehow, that question seems totally obscure given my vision of the life of a 14 year old.
Maybe it’s because I started reading John Taylor Gatto again. Here are some excerpts from his book A Different Kind of Teacher:
At the turn of the twentieth century a profound social thinker in France named George Simmel wrote a remarkable book called The Philosophy of Money. In it, Simmel, one of the great creative theorists of this century, said that money contained a powerful internal contradiction built into the foundations of its abstract existence: by robbing things of their innate identity and replacing that core identity with a money identity, by making everything interchangeable with money, money often cheapened things and removed their significance! Simmel said that whenever genuine personal qualities like service were offered for money, that the pricing of these things inevitably trivialized what had been priced. The services tend to gradually become degraded, to lose distinction, just exactly as if the money itself sharply reduced the value of what was being purchased.
(...)
When schools consume the youth of the nation in confinement, and all the products of all their labors become paper to be thrown away, there is no joy possible in seeking of such goods. The pricing of time through grade points establishes an irrational currency by which something precious, time, is corrupted in the service of arbitrary and nonsensical urgencies.
Experts who are the sellers of school services to the government have consistently misdiagnosed and misdefined the problem of schooling. The problem is not that children don’t learn to read, write, and do arithmetic very well—those deficiencies are direct by-products of our errors of definition. The problem is that kids hardly learn at all the way schools insist on teaching.
(...)
Our cultural dilemma here in the United States has nothing to do with children who don’t read very well. It lies instead in the difficulty of finding a way to restore meaning and purpose to modern life. There is no point in reading if it seems to lead nowhere. We have progressively stripped children of the primary experience base they need to grow up sound and whole by pricing abstract study higher. The great irony has been that while we have devalued service and life experience, abstraction has followed the path Simmel predicted—it, too, matters less and less.
Maybe I’m crazy for thinking there exists a huge profile of 14 year olds for whom the knowledge about how energy is transferred when sound waves travel through air is totally irrelevant. And maybe I’m crazy for thinking there is no amount of extortion schools can exert to force kids into caring about something so obviously pointless and disconnected from adolescent life. And yet maybe the craziest thing is not that the issue of sound waves is irrelevant—but perhaps the problem is that people really don’t care about sound waves: tons of 14 year olds do not have curiosity about such things anymore. What killed their curiosity? Will state report cards for school districts and more standardized tests restore a lost intellectual curiosity? Can the kids be bribed with the money of grades? Or is Gatto right?
In any event, I still can’t help but be curious about how adults would fare on some 8th grade practice tests.
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06 May 2008 at 01:31 pm | #
~
Although we failed the test, we hear you loud and clear !
Brilliant work !
Thank ‘GOD’ for spell check !
~
08 May 2008 at 07:56 am | #
Dean, is the answer D? I probably failed the test as well but its not like I need to know these things for my job. I sell insurance and most of the time people don’t ask me about sound waves. Although I feel terrible because when I was forced to sit and take to OGT I aced all of them except for math!
Rereading Gatto Dean? You should never have stopped! He is a brilliant mind in a world full of dull boring minds!
08 May 2008 at 01:16 pm | #
D
i’m in.