Reconciling Totalitarian Assessment with a Democratic Classroom

In Chapter 6, Ayers discusses the totalitarianism of standardized testing. His view that by allowing any one group to decide what is the best knowledge to have is totalitarian by nature meshes with my view that different geographic areas value different things to learn and thus the education of American children should not be entirely uniform. The responsibility to educate citizens resides in the states' hands, not the federal government's hands, and a national test is a bad idea because of unique valuation and the totalitarianism embodied by one group of people determining the knowledge that everyone should have.

At the same time, knowledge is limitless, and there has to be some consistency in what is taught, and there is already. Consistency across states in assessment is unnecessary, I think, but not per se wrong. If standardized tests weren't given so much power in policy determination and evaluation I would be less upset by the un-democraticness of the tests. But, they are powerful, and anything as powerful in determining national or state direction as standardized test results are should be more democratic in nature in the U.S. democracy.

Chapter 3 inspired a lot of thinking. All of Ayers's descriptions of acquaintances' houses made me wonder what my house and home tell people about me and those that live with me. My situation is different than the ones Ayers describes because I am in a rental house that I share with my husband and another couple who we are unrelated to. It's a roommate situation. In a roommate rather than a family living situation, it's harder to make your house yours, even if you are the owner and others are just leasees. So maybe a better question would be what do our "private" rooms tell others about us. I'll have to ask a neutral observer sometime. But, does a house embody a personality to a complete stranger? Or does a house not take on personal traits until an observer knows a person well? Same question could be asked of a classroom.

Ayers is so blunt about what he thinks but simultaneously poetic. He's a great descriptive writer, and the way he states things about learning environments really kind of makes me cringe inside, because they're thoughts maybe I did not want to have but really they're there and have been there I've just been avoiding pondering them. For example:

"The most taken for granted...and commonplace features of life in school carry messages about important issues: this is how people learn; this is what is valuable; this is what you should attend to. And these messages constitute a major part of what is learned and what becomes assumed about school"

"Kids understand that school is about crowds--there is no privacy and there is little individuality. What's good for the group had better be good for me. The schedule is in charge"

"In school authority is established and learning about hierarchy becomes crucial; democracy is talked about but not practiced, issues of larger community interest are rarely considered and never acted on."

"Kids see that in school, learning is linked to age more than anything else, and...neatly divided into nine-month units"

I wish I could get away with stating things so bluntly in class! Of course, I am not respected like Ayers so that's probably why, but wouldn't it be nice?

Ayers puts up student work in his classrooms in order to make his classroom more than just his and also to ensure democracy in his classroom. Everyone's contributions are equally valid. It is not his job to determine what the classroom looks like or the curriculum either, for he is a teacher practicing democratic schooling. Most teachers put up student work because that's what you do with classrooms, at least that appears to be why. I doubt many have reasons as pointed and significant as Ayers does.

Ayers's point about learning with a purpose is valid. Why has this learning been lost? Why isn't academic learning more like real-life learning? Shouldn't it be? Aren't schools supposed to prepare students for real life in addition to teaching them new things? Shouldn't these new ideas have some practical application that is visible to students, or that a teacher can at least point out? Why is the old adage "You'll need to know this when you have a job" or "You'll need to know this when you're an adult" spoken so widely? How come we cannot instead show students by purposeful learning that the knowledge is necessary? The best way to learn is through one's own mistakes and missteps. Ayers is so right that by breaking learning into irrelevant pieces that only adults can impart to you are "absolutely disastrous lessons if curious and critical dispositions of mind is a goal." This is my goal as an educator, do others not share it? What about administrators? What is their goal? The goals of schooling are wide, I know, but shouldn't something as simple and necessary as curious and critical mental disposition be on everyone's goal list?

Ayers's reminder that everyone in a classroom is a whole person, including the teacher, "Her passions--singing, quilting, hiking, dancing--will be well represented [in her classroom]" raise a contentious issue with me. Many people get upset with me for saying that my students should know my pasions. It seems like peers want me to hide it in order to avoid imposing ideas on children. I'm a strong, passionate, and independent woman and I feel great pressure to robotize myself in order to successfully teach. To thine own self be true. I have been true to myself for eight years; I am not giving that self-knowledge up for anyone or any job. That seems wrong to me. Yes, teaching is a role, but the teacher is a whole person too, and why should I deny my own wholeness for my students to have the best change to be whole people themselves? It makes no sense to me. Sacrificing myself as a person in order to help them be people: Is that what I am being asked to do?

Authentic Assessment

"The root of the word evaluation is value, and authentic assessment includes understanding FIRST (emphasis added) what students VALUE and then building from there."

Ayers's definition of assessment is totally upside-down from the mainstream view of assessment and I love it. Much of assessment is dictated by what society values or what school superintendents value. Very little seems to consider what students value first. Within classrooms that may not be true, but most standardized testing and the like is not about what students value. No wonder school is such a dull, drab, boring place for most children. Ayers definition of assessment is a throwback to Dewey's ideas on education. It's an interesting coincidence they they are/were both faculty at University of Chicago. And Paley's book also was written about an experimental school at University of Chicago. I wonder what Chicago's public schools look like with such progressive minds filling the teacher education halls.

I completely agree with Ayers that standardized tests are given way more power than they deserve and they suck even resisting people into their maelstrom. Ayers depictions of both himself and another anti-testing colleague's reactions to standardized test scores were revealing. Especially his colleague that went through hell and high water to get his daughter's test scores up; not because he did not consider his daughter intelligent but rather because "Those scores are like a union card. The union may be crooked and run by gangsters, but, hey, no union card, no work."

What a sad position for children of today to be in. Their whole future sometimes hinges on those test scores. But at the same time, in the working world, if you are only good at taking tests and cannot function within a group or if you lack people skills, then you are less likely to "get promoted." However, in some industries, the smartest people according to test scores but the dumbest when it comes to people and social skills are the managers. My roommate works at Microsoft, a company that seeks the best minds in the world to be employees. She is continuously frustrated by many of her managers because they do not have people skills. They may be smart, but they are a pain to work with and make for pretty poor managers.

Ayers explosion of the myth of scientific objectivity of test scores was revealing, especially how the averages are determined. The cultural bias and simplified way of determing averages make people aware before the test even begins of who will be the winners and who will be the losers. I wonder if teachers really do know before the test is administered? Ayers is just one education professional; he can't speak for all educators, though he's got a lot of good ideas and insights.

Ayers argument that the problem of drill and skill curriculum prevailing over a more comprehensive, problem-solving, critical thinking curriculum in our test-loving world is worse for those children who have the deck stacked against them just by their birth is strong. "By focusing on the ability to answer multiple-choice questions, reading is reduced to a set of relatively unimportant skills, and the link between reading and power is further broken." This broken link is the greatest loss of all, in my opinion.

I like Ayers's ideas about being frank with students about what the tests mean. Would such honesty, such bluntness about the lack of any real value in standardized testing be permitted to occur? Many people wish to shelter children in schools from harsh realities of the world and I think this is OK to a point, but I think it is crucial for children to know they exist and that there are tough obstacles to face as humans. Children should know the real value in standardized testing, but I foresee a lot of resistance from parents and curriculum writers if teachers pursued this strategy. Really, what you must do to do well on a standardized test is learn to take the test, but that should not be the goal of all learning in schools. Knowledge of the content of the test is much less significant to achieving high test scores than are the tricks to taking the test well.