The State of Oregon will release the results of the 2009 State Assessments on Monday. Corbett will show up well. As has become our habit, we will look about average for the first several years of schooling, while most districts are focused on cranking out passing scores and we are focused on developing the life-long habits of great learners. Then somewhere around 6th or 7th grade, Corbett students will start out-performing those same schools that might have looked 'stronger' in grade 3. By grade 8 it will be apparent that the mystical qualities of Corbett water have kicked in, and by grade 10 it will be difficult to imagine that Corbett students were taking the same test as their counterparts around the state. And so it goes. Again.
There are several reasons that Corbett's passing 'curve' across time looks different than those of other districts. One primary reason is that we pay less attention to State of Oregon Standards (which the tests are supposed to measure) than do others. Other districts will be sponsoring 'professional learning communities' who are trained (at considerable expense) to gather around their test scores and work at modifying their instruction in order to change the numbers. No, thanks. Rather than organizing our thinking around a single standard that all fourth graders should be able to meet, we are organized around how far we bring each child along as a reader, a writer, and mathematician, a citizen, a good friend to his or her classmates. And if that work is out of alignment with the Oregon standards, then the standards are wrong. We aren't changing.
What saves us in the end is that at grade ten the State Reading Assessment is written in English and the State Math Assessment includes numbers and symbols. And the vast majority of our students are able to read and think at a level that renders the particulars of Oregon's standards (on which the state has spent thousands of hours and who knows how much money) irrelevant and boosts our passing rates to among the highest in the state.
The Standards Movement, upon which our State Assessments, State Report Cards, and AYP Designations are based, just got it wrong. Learning can't be standardized. Learning benchmarks are the tragic misapplication of a perfectly good measuring tool to an inappropriate object. It's like using a yardstick to measure softness. Doesn't make it a bad yardstick...just makes the results silly. And the more precisely we try to measure (down the the sixteenth of an inch?), the sillier it gets.
What's the alternative approach to education? There are a number of ways to think about it, but the one that comes to mind today is (to rob C.S. Lewis, who probably wouldn't have minded) 'higher up and further in'. Education is a journey the endpoint of which is necessarily unspecified. But that doesn't mean that we can't know that we are on the way or that we can't see progress (or sometimes the lack thereof) with our own eyes. Those who have traveled the way before us have left sign posts, love notes, artifacts. The trail isn't hard to find, at least in the early going. And our kids don't need a map printed in Salem or Washington, D.C. They need a guide. Someone who has walked the trail before, and who has traversed these early stretches so often that they are able to offer advice and assistance to the first-timers. They need a guiding hand on the slick spots and a high five upon the successful navigation of a particularly challenging obstacle. What they don't need is to be measured, labeled, classified and sorted while they are still learning how to be part of the fellowship of travelers.
So the State Assessments results are good for public relations. But I promise not to take them too seriously if you won't. We have much more important work to do.
