Forty years ago the study “A Nation At Risk” was published. The report called out American public schools for their rising tide of mediocrity, and said that we we needed to improve our educational systems by improving our test scores.
Now, forty years later, we have been waging a war to push test scores higher in the name of “improving” public schools. We have had No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and Every Student Succeeds. We have used data for instruction. We have standardized instruction. We have micromanaged teachers. We have made everything more “rigorous” – all the way down to Kindergarten, where playtime and play space have been removed so we can make Kindergarteners more competent. (Think about that idea for a moment.)
Here in 2023, testing is spiraling out of control. As a high school teacher I have spent up to 23 class days out of 180 administering tests. We have standards now. I’m on my fifth set of standards and my 5th standardized test in English. Are standards really standard if they change every few years?
We have taken autonomous, professional teachers who were trained to develop units and create a flow to the school year, who knew how to pace things and create lessons tailored to their specific students, and we have standardized, micromanaged, and curriculum-mapped them out of being professionals. We have made them instead curriculum dispensers and (as I called them in my comic strip many years ago) Quantifiable Learning Gains Facilitators. You know what motivates people to do good work? According to Daniel Pink’s book Drive, it’s Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. Autonomy for teachers? Out the window. Mastery for teachers? There’s nothing to master if you are just following a map. You are an automaton. Purpose? Raising test scores may be measurable, but no one ever claimed test scores were particularly meaningful to humans.
So in the name of “improving” teaching, we have driven teachers out of the profession, made them depressed, and beaten them down if they stay.
So here we are, 40 years after “A Nation At Risk”: we are suffering from a massive teacher shortage nationwide, our students are generally (in my experience) disengaged from school, and our test scores, depending on who you ask, have remained flat or are even falling behind other nations.
And that’s without even getting to school vouchers, school choice, book bans, and teachers being called groomers and pedophiles. (What a fantastic way to get people to stay in the profession: call them really bad names and threaten them with felony charges. Just what HR ordered!)
After all these years of standards and testing and accountability, we live in a country where many citizens believe in alternative facts and conspiracy theories, where many people don’t understand science, where few seem aware of the power and risks of the narratives and metaphors they believe. Too many people, it seems, seldom take the time to understand other points of view, or to question their own. After decades of multiple choice testing, people are more likely to think there is one right answer for everything, and that they possess it, rather than think that there might be nuanced perspectives that allow for more than one right answer.
Forty years after its publication, I have to wonder – is what we have now the change and success the framers of “A Nation At Risk” had in mind? Or would they be appalled by what the report has wrought?
Or, as public schools are under endless attack, alternative history is being promoted (involuntary servants, indeed), calls to ban books are at their highest levels ever, and the teaching profession is being eviscerated… is this exactly what the authors of “A Nation At Risk” hoped for?