March 3, 2008
David Hursh warns that high-stakes testing has
narrowed education
kathleen.mcgarvey@rochester.edu
Educator, Warner School associate professor, and
education policy expert David Hursh talks about his newest book, High-Stakes Testing and the Decline of Teaching and
Learning: The Real Crisis in Education (Rowman
and Littlefield).
What prompted you to write this book?
I start off by saying I never wanted to be a teacher;
I hated school, but I got interested in it because it seemed to me the
place where the essential questions about the nature of knowledge, how we
relate to people, and what is democracy, play out on a small scale. I got
involved first in higher education and then as an elementary teacher, and
then I started my own school.
David Hursh
Historically, education has been organized around the
factory model. There’s been an emphasis on turning out students so
that they become good workers. There’s been an absence of
critical thinking and an emphasis, most recently, on standardized
testing—and high-stakes standardized testing. I’m not
against standardized tests per se, but the emphasis on testing is really
driving instruction at this point. And so my concern in the second half of
the book is, how do we fight what’s going on, and how do we get
schools to be the kind of places they can be?
How would you say the classroom has changed from
what it was 10, 20, or 30 years ago?
The curriculum has narrowed, and there’s a focus
on math and language arts, to the detriment of science, social studies, and
the arts.
One of the ways in which you teach both language arts
and math is by integrating them into other areas. I describe in the book a
geology project, which I didn’t plan to teach because you don’t
teach geology to five-, six-, and seven-year-olds. The kids loved exploring
geology: they wrote and read about it. It’s an example of how
language arts becomes more meaningful because it is infused within a larger
activity.
But now we don’t do that: subjects are separated
rather than integrated. And so we see that elementary students often
aren’t doing any science at all.
You treat the 1983 report A Nation at Risk as a kind of
turning point that laid the groundwork for the next 25 years. How did
it do that?
It changed the nature of the debate. It blamed
the schools for economic problems. It was part of a larger movement
that’s been incessant: blaming the schools, saying we need to hold
the schools more accountable, and therefore we need to move to
privatization, markets, and competition.
To what extent do you find those arguments
resonating with the public?
There’s actually a backlash, it seems, against
No Child Left Behind, because parents have always been satisfied with their
local schools, by and large. If you ask people what do you think
about schools in general, they’ll say schools in general aren’t
doing very well, but that their own school is good. But increasingly
people are saying that schools are doing well, and in fact the tests are
harming what’s going on in schools. Right now you would find
very little support for most of the policies that make up No Child Left
Behind.
At the end of the book, you say: “We face a
crisis in education different from the one reported in the press.”
What’s the real crisis?
The crisis reported in the press is that schools are
failing and we need to make them accountable, and [testing] is the way to
do it. However, the real crisis is caused by those changes.
I know people who go into teaching and quit, and
people who are thinking about going into teaching, but they say, “I
don’t want to go in and just follow a script.” We’re
driving out the smartest people in education. We’re bringing in
teachers whose only experience is opening a book and following that
curriculum.
And I’m worried that we’re driving out the
notion that education is a complicated activity that requires
considerable discussion and debate. There are no easy answers. We’re
not allowing ourselves to have that discussion anymore. We’re
letting bureaucrats, or book publishers,
decide. But why don’t we talk about what education is?
Why isn’t that something teachers talk about?
And that’s the crisis. I’m worried we’re not even going
to be able to have those discussions because it’s all been decided by
the companies that make the tests.
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