On the Tyranny of Test Scores, Kind Of
tl;dr - Stop with the worksheets, standardized tests, and asking tiny children to pretend to be much older. These things aren’t creating a better workforce and are probably creating a worse one.
“If we were expecting a famine next year, we wouldn’t starve children now to prepare them for it.” That quote from (an early childhood education podcast I enjoy was the best way I’ve heard anyone succinctly explain why moving “school” earlier in childhood is bad for children. I’m going to refer to this academicization of early childhood education as “starting school early”. As is frequently the case, I’m sure some well-meaning person was trying to solve a problem and didn’t think through the consequences of starting school early - and inadvertantly made the problem they wanted to solve worse.
Oh no, they are passing us!
What would the world be if nations weren’t continuously competing with each other in the worst possible ways? Aside from the fact that the US is very different culturally from Russia, or China, or Norway, or whoever we compete with in education, the metrics - test scores - that we start with are poor proxies for what we are trying to achieve anyway. High test scores are typically correlated with privileged socio-economic status and access to support more than other factors. They are also correlated with better college performance which typically leads to higher pay and thus oroboros starts in on his tail again when the children of those people with high test scores have high test scores in turn. For those who break out of the opposite cycle, the improvement in quality of life due to higher socio-economic status is wonderful; it does not mean that those people joining the workforce are better equipped for the jobs of today and tomorrow, high test scores or none
I’ve worked in early childhood, K-12, and with adults in corporate settings and I can confidently say that the thing we believe we want - creative people who take initiative, think critically, and solve problems - isn’t coming to fruition. I don’t believe that there are fewer people with those skills now than there have been in the past, but that we have more jobs now that require that approach than a more rote style of work. What I do believe is that we saw this coming and tried to do something about it with more college! more worksheets! more sitting still and learning! and got significantly less than we bargained for. Rather than trying to understand why we didn’t have more people capable of knowledge work, we decided that doing what we had always done harder would solve all of our problems. But I guess maybe the test scores look better?
I’ve Tried Nothing New and I’m All Out of Ideas!
Given our higher test scores, and our compounded efforts to improve them, we should be leading the world in everything. We aren’t, which I know is a surprise to some, and things don’t seem to be improving. I have conversations with people daily across multiple industries who are frustrated with their co-workers, managers, and teams because they haven’t caught on that their jobs are inherently knowledge work. What everyone is really good at is doing exactly what they are told, how they are told, when they are told. Not exactly the problem-solving genius we were looking for and potentially worse than what we had before. I have found that it takes a lot of work to facilitate team members moving from, “Tell me what to do” to, “I identified a problem and this is how I plan to solve it” or even, “You gave me a problem and this is how I solved it.” It may be that this is how things have always been, but either way, we need more of the latter and less of the former and our current approach, which is simply the older approach repackaged with metrics, consultants, and an earlier start, doesn’t seem to be cutting it.
The craziest part of this discussion is that we’ve had answers to how to solve this problem for at least a hundred years but we don’t want them because they aren’t easy, don’t immediately and cheaply scale, and aren’t fit for a plug and play workforce of teachers at all levels. John Dewey was extolling the virtues of child-led, open-ended learning through intentionally preparation of materials and environment in the late 1800’s. Maria Montessori was revolutionizing the very idea of what - who - children are in the early 1900s. In the mid-1900s, Erik Erikson developing a framework that captured how and why children develop the way they do at each age based on psychological sensitive periods that have been further supported by advances in neuroscience. Jean Piaget (whose work and conclusions have been considered limited because they were based on his work primarily with his own three children) gave us a framework for understanding cognitive development in the same time-period. Lev Vygotsky added the concepts of the zone of proximal development and scaffolding. In spite of the wealth of resources supported by data and real interactions with children that suggest all of these “progressive” approaches are preferable and lead to better outcomes (people who can think critically and participate in society in a healthy and productive way) we continue to cling to the Prussian model of education as a society. The Prussian model is easier to scale, it doesn’t require you to know anything about children to implement, and it doesn’t involve any of those inconvenient requirements for context-based observation and responses. But now we have more interesting and fun curriculum for children to sit still and use! It has been proven this curriculum improves test scores!
What is a Prussian Anyway?
Most people prefer what is familiar, and rows of desks, uniformity, and dogged devotion to hierarchy and “respect” is what most people are used to. They probably have no idea that the way children in the US and elsewhere have been learning for the better part of a century is based on a model intended to facilitate compliance, obedience, and total support of the implementing government’s goals. It isn’t intended to teach problem-solving and is actually intended to stifle the kind of creative thinking and initiative required to solve problems.
It’s horrifying to see this model applied in early childhood settings. Have you ever tried to get a three-year-old to sit still and listen to a teacher give a lesson followed by a worksheet, though? How about ten at a time? It’s unnerving and sad to watch when it does happen. Alternatively, have you ever talked to a three-year-old who is excited to learn because they are discovering the answers to questions they had? It’s exhilarating to be part of that kind of energy and experience and to watch a curious mind develop. It’s a privilege to be help facilitate the growth of those budding little brains based on a clear understanding of what is happening, why, and when it should happen. It can be harder and it’s less orderly, but it’s far more useful, to everyone, in the long run. And sure, someone further down the line might be doing something wrong, but we shouldn’t starve kids today so they can sit still in a broken system tomorrow.