RE: The Wrath of Kohn

[Rip Stauffer <rstauffer@bluefirepartners.com>]

James Robert Crow asks: "How can you have accountability without testing?
How can you know is education is taking place and that students are being
prepared for life long learning without testing?"

I guess my initial reaction is: What place does accountability have in a
system for education? Who do we hold accountable? What do we hold them
accountable for? 

There is testing and there is testing. Standardized testing can be a guage,
I suppose, of whether students have absorbed some basic portion of a
curriculum and can regurgitate portions of it. Whether they can apply it,
whether they can synthesize pieces of it into new and useful theories won't
be tested in a standardized test. This kind of knowledge about students'
preparedness for lifelong learning can only come through teachers, parents
and others (who care whether the students are thus prepared) taking the time
to learn something about the students--what DO they know, what DO they think
and feel, what DO they want to do, and what DO they want to learn to be able
to do it?

What many governments are trying to do--using standardized testing as a
guage so they can "hold someone accountable"--is a deterministic approach
that assumes that there is someone they can punish if the scores aren't high
enough, and that punishing that person would accomplish something.
Standardized test scores tend to be the result of a system (one that even
includes the testing organization--in Minnesota last year, a number of
people were "held accountable" for a rash of low test scores, only to find
that the grading system for that run of standardized tests was using an
answer key from a different run!). Has anyone figured out a way to hold a
system accountable? Has accountability improved anyone's system?

Best regards to all,

Rip Stauffer

Rip Stauffer, Senior Consultant
BlueFire Partners
1300 Fifth St. Towers, 150 So. Fifth St.
Minneapolis, MN 55402
612-344-1027
mailto:rstauffer@bluefirepartners.com
http://www.bluefirepartners.com/