Posted on 10/28/2003 7:10:23 AM PST by mrustow
Whereas over 80% of Americans support external, high-stakes, standardized testing as the best method for determining what students are learning; discovering their academic deficiencies, so that they may be remedied; and in deciding whether to promote students from grade to grade; you’d never know it, to listen to the socialist, establishment media or the progressives and constructivists who have taken over university departments of teacher education and the nation’s public schools.
One such progressive is Kevin Kumashiro. Kumashiro, who is the “director of the Center for Anti-Oppressive Education, a resource center for educators, leaders, students and advocates base in California,” is also associated with the Madison, Wisconisn-based Progressive Media Project.
Kumashiro’s motto is, “Preparing members of educational communities to create and engage in forms of education that challenge multiple oppressions.” Alright, so it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but it’s hard to sound like Oscar Hammerstein II, when you’re challenging multiple oppressions. Still, had Kumashiro asked for my input, I would have at least shortened it to, “Preparing educational communities to challenge multiple oppressions,” or just, “Challenging oppressions.”
Having little faith in their audience’s ability to grasp their positions, educational progressives and constructivists insist on multiple redundancies. Explicating those redundancies, Kumashiro tells us that,
“Founded in 2002, the Center for Anti-Oppressive Education (CAOE) recognizes that the quality of education cannot improve unless we commit to challenging the racism, classism, sexism, and other oppressions that permeate our schools and societies. Through its projects on research, curriculum, professional development, and local advocacy, CAOE develops and provides innovative resources for educators, leaders, students, and advocates throughout the United States and the world who are interested in creating and engaging in anti-oppressive forms of education.”
All that “creating and engaging” doesn’t leave much time for teaching the 3Rs. Instead, Kumashiro devotes himself to sabotaging any tool that would measure how well teachers and students are doing their respective jobs.
Kumashiro has organized conferences on “teacher education and social justice,” and has one coming up in December, on “empowering teachers in times of war,” which will presumably be about how to undermine America -- in other words, help al Qaeda -- in the War on Terror.
In an October 19, Tallahassee Democrat op-ed, “Leaving Good Teachers Behind,” Kevin Kumashiro repeats many of the myths spread by those whom Richard Phelps has dubbed “test-bashers.” Test-bashers are pedagogical progressives and constructivists who hate standardized tests, because the tests show how poorly many teachers are doing their jobs, and because American black* and Hispanic students, the groups most dramatically betrayed by progressive and constructivist educators, tend to do worse than all other groups on them. “External” means that local school officials do not control the grading of the tests. (Local grading is an invitation to corruption.) “Standardized” means that they are given across the country, so that results from different areas can be compared. “High-stakes” means that something hangs on the results, thus that students have a motivation to succeed.
*(By “American black,” I am distinguishing between those black students who were born in the West Indies or Africa, or born in the U.S. to West Indian or African-born parents, as opposed to those students whose ancestors came to America generations ago from the West Indies or Africa. American social scientists and journalists typically lump all those groups together under the doubly misleading rubric, “African-American.”)
Kumashiro insists that: 1. Great teachers are leaving the profession, due to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB); 2. Educational performance is based solely on the amount of money a school has; 3. That NCLB forces all teachers to teach the same way; 4. NCLB forces teachers to ignore students’ individuality; 5. NCLB “require[s] that all students think the same way; 6. Standardized tests do not “measure whether students are truly learning”; 7. “Test results prove to be significantly influenced by race, class, language, geography, learning disabilities and gender”; and 8. NCLB causes teachers to “spend an inordinate amount of time training students to pass tests,” often following scripts.
All of the above claims are repeated endlessly, with no scientific or scholarly support, by test-bashers. Test-bashers claim that “research” supports them, but the “research” proves merely to be more advocacy pieces like Mr. Kumashiro’s. As Sandra Stotsky observed in Losing Our Language: How Multicultural Classroom Instruction is Undermining Our Children’s Ability to Read, Write, and Reason, an education scholar (often a tenured university professor of teacher education) will typically cite “research” supporting his editorializing. When one checks out the “research,” however, it turns out to be yet another advocacy piece, which in turn cites other “research,” in an endless regression of political logrolling, which is just a fancy way of lying. The other type of research defending progressive pedagogy, is old-fashioned lying.
As I showed in my previous column, lying is one of the fundamental methods of progressive and constructivist pedagogies.
Even if one were conducting real research, less than two years after Pres. Bush signed NCLB into law (on January 8, 2002), it would be too soon to determine if it were driving teachers out of the profession. And no amount of time would permit us to determine if “our nation's best teachers [were] choosing to leave the profession.”
In fact, test-bashers have been making the same claims for years, without any proof. Prior to NCLB, it was “standardized testing” that supposedly was driving teachers out of the profession. The ed lobby has also long claimed regarding New York City teachers, that they were quitting city schools for greener suburban pastures, because of inferior city pay scales. The truth turned out to be that teachers were disheartened by school violence, and that they were quitting the profession altogether.
The notion that standardized testing is driving teachers out of the profession, is simply a lie that test-bashers invented out of whole cloth.
The notion that school performance is based solely on funding is also pervasively repeated by progressives and constructivists, despite having been discredited again and again and again. The nation’s worst schools, in cities like Washington, D.C. and New York, are among its best-funded.
While the NCLB does require testing, it has nothing to say about the development of curricula, or about how a teacher should run his classroom.
Kevin Kumashiro claims that there is no clear body of knowledge that should be taught to children, only to contradict himself, by arguing that there is a clear set of skills that children need to learn. Those skills derive from knowledge and drills. Kumashiro claims to speak for skepticism, regarding what is taught in the schools, against regurgitation, and for a recognition of the vagaries of knowledge, but is in fact a proponent of a radical, anti-intellectual pedagogy, which politicizes everything that occurs in the classroom, forces children to regurgitate, robot-like, multicultural orthodoxy, and reduces children to their race, ethnicity, sex, sexuality and physical condition. So much for embracing vagaries and individuality.
And what is true of Kevin Kumashiro, is true of progressive and constructive pedagogues in general. They are hostile towards real knowledge, but suspend all skepticism, when it comes to teaching children multicultural propaganda. And the constructivist now running curriculum for the New York City Schools, Deputy Chancellor Diana Lam, makes all teachers slavishly follow scripts. (In fact, both sides of the pedagogical aisle often rely on scripts.)
Kumashiro’s charges that NCLB imposes conformity on students is a simple case of projection.
Kumashiro’s assertion that “Test results prove to be significantly influenced by race, class, language, geography, learning disabilities and gender,” its mushy language notwithstanding, again denies students all individuality. The phrase “significantly influenced,” is supposed to sound scientific, but is meaningless.
Kumashiro insists that educators are teaching to the test. As Richard Phelps notes, this most popular myth among test-bashers, is frequently based on defining all teaching as “teaching to the test,” and then, in a case of “heads we win, tails you lose,” condemning any test that is not based on classroom teaching.
Kevin Kumashiro condemns standardized testing, but in fact, standardized testing offers the most objective, informative method for determining what and how well students have learned.
Test-bashers claim that classroom grades and “portfolios” of class work are more accurate measures of students learning than standardized tests. At increasing numbers of schools, however, classroom grades are a worthless indicator of what a student has learned. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, my research showed that in higher education, grades had become hopelessly inflated, and were held hostage to racial, ethnic, and sexual politics. In the schools, things are much worse.
Progressives’ claims as to the power of portfolios are so much hocus-pocus. A portfolio is redundant as a basis for grading a student; it will simply contain work for which he has already been graded. Some progressives speak of a portfolio of “special projects,” but only the brightest students, who have already mastered the basics, and thus do well on standardized tests, can do special projects sufficiently ambitious as to display a mastery of classroom material. But progressives are unconcerned with the brightest students; their objective is to fudge the grades of failing black and Hispanic students, and socially promote them. But when failing students are promoted, they never learn how to read or do math, and fall ever farther behind.
The best documented and most readable classification and refutation of test-bashing myths I know of, is Richard Phelps' new book, Kill the Messenger: The War on Standardized Testing.
Test-bashers oppose standardized testing, because they oppose educational accountability and reform. I spent seven years teaching test-bashers’ victims, in remedial college classes.
Don't permit the government to control the in the education of your children.
But "My child is a star student at...." bumper stickers are their hedge against parental scrutiny.
Don't permit the government to control the in the education of your children.
Could you please translate that statement into English?
Maybe that should read "Center for Oppressive Anti-Education"
For many parents, a good school is one where their own child does well. And with academic standards dumbed down, parents are satisfactorily reassured that we are all raising above-average children. Until more parents recognize that their local schools do not represent an oasis of educational excellence in a wasteland of educational mediocrity, we will have the schools that complacent parents deserve. ***
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