Happy New Year! Silver linings are hard to see in cloud cover as thick and unrelenting as 2020. 2020 was a year best seen in the rearview mirror (perhaps 2020 hindsight?). Only the willfully blind - that is to say 74 million Americans, give or take - might see 2020 as a pretty darn good year.
As a teacher who has a vested interest in anything Steve Nelson pens (full disclosure – I’m his brother), I must take issue with two things in this post. The first is the Hansel and Gretel analogy. Steve wrote:
…uber-frequent testing is like weighing Hansel and Gretel constantly and expecting them to gain weight without feeding them very often.
That’s cute, but it’s not an apt comparison for several reasons, not the least reason being that it is not nearly damning enough about standardized testing. A more accurate version might look something like this:
…uber-frequent testing is like weighing Hansel and Gretel with a scale that isn’t calibrated, frequently produces random results, and actually measures cholesterol, not mass, then extrapolates that to a guess at their weight using a formula developed by a school administrator and an education researcher.
Of course, at this point the thought is so unwieldy as to be appalling. But it’s right.
If any subject is amendable to the measurement of student achievement (whatever that is) by use of a standardized test, mathematics, the subject I teach, should be it. It isn’t. In my extensive experience, standardized mathematics tests measure perhaps two things: one, they indicate with varying reliability the student’s ability to perform certain specific tasks under considerable duress that are at least tangentially related to, but hardly indicative of, actual mathematical achievement; and two, they indicate with somewhat better reliability their own substantial cultural and socioeconomic biases. Contrast that middling value with their criminal effect upon students and learning and it’s not hard to conclude that Hansel and Gretel had it no worse than the average 8th grader during testing season.
My second issue is both more timely and more of a challenge to my brother’s sentiments, especially given that he and I have no disagreement about standardized testing. Concerning on-line education, he writes:
It failed spectacularly, an outcome that any progressive educator would have easily predicted. Real learning is engaging, active, human, sensory-rich, differentiated, funny, musical, spontaneous and based in discovery, not boring exercises on computer screens.
My concern is not with his description of real learning. I could not agree with him more (and I have never expressed it as well, although I might add “intimate” and “social” to his list of adjectives). My concern – and for me it is a profound concern – is with his conclusion that our COVID-induced surge in online education “failed spectacularly.” Did it? Not from where I sit.
I’m afraid there might be some conflation here. It’s obvious that there were massive problems with attendance, engagement and accountability. But that’s not the same as saying that there is a problem with the mechanism of online education as a way to teach. My fear (dread is a better word) is that too many people, enthralled with the facility, convenience and glitz of online education, will see it as just as good as, if not better than, traditional classroom learning, and never want to go back. Attendance problems can be dealt with by establishing new procedures, let’s give students options, flexibility is good, these tools are so neat, etc.
I see plenty of evidence that this is a prevailing line of thought in too many circles, and it’s a line of thought that in my mind would be a death knell to real education. Online education is no substitute for classroom learning; it’s utterly inferior and therefore rife with inequity. I have hard time describing it as education at all. But I think we have a fight on our hands if we’re going to sustain that as a prevailing sentiment and slow the online teaching juggernaut. I wish my brother’s report of failure was right, but I doubt it.
As a teacher who has a vested interest in anything Steve Nelson pens (full disclosure – I’m his brother), I must take issue with two things in this post. The first is the Hansel and Gretel analogy. Steve wrote:
…uber-frequent testing is like weighing Hansel and Gretel constantly and expecting them to gain weight without feeding them very often.
That’s cute, but it’s not an apt comparison for several reasons, not the least reason being that it is not nearly damning enough about standardized testing. A more accurate version might look something like this:
…uber-frequent testing is like weighing Hansel and Gretel with a scale that isn’t calibrated, frequently produces random results, and actually measures cholesterol, not mass, then extrapolates that to a guess at their weight using a formula developed by a school administrator and an education researcher.
Of course, at this point the thought is so unwieldy as to be appalling. But it’s right.
If any subject is amendable to the measurement of student achievement (whatever that is) by use of a standardized test, mathematics, the subject I teach, should be it. It isn’t. In my extensive experience, standardized mathematics tests measure perhaps two things: one, they indicate with varying reliability the student’s ability to perform certain specific tasks under considerable duress that are at least tangentially related to, but hardly indicative of, actual mathematical achievement; and two, they indicate with somewhat better reliability their own substantial cultural and socioeconomic biases. Contrast that middling value with their criminal effect upon students and learning and it’s not hard to conclude that Hansel and Gretel had it no worse than the average 8th grader during testing season.
My second issue is both more timely and more of a challenge to my brother’s sentiments, especially given that he and I have no disagreement about standardized testing. Concerning on-line education, he writes:
It failed spectacularly, an outcome that any progressive educator would have easily predicted. Real learning is engaging, active, human, sensory-rich, differentiated, funny, musical, spontaneous and based in discovery, not boring exercises on computer screens.
My concern is not with his description of real learning. I could not agree with him more (and I have never expressed it as well, although I might add “intimate” and “social” to his list of adjectives). My concern – and for me it is a profound concern – is with his conclusion that our COVID-induced surge in online education “failed spectacularly.” Did it? Not from where I sit.
I’m afraid there might be some conflation here. It’s obvious that there were massive problems with attendance, engagement and accountability. But that’s not the same as saying that there is a problem with the mechanism of online education as a way to teach. My fear (dread is a better word) is that too many people, enthralled with the facility, convenience and glitz of online education, will see it as just as good as, if not better than, traditional classroom learning, and never want to go back. Attendance problems can be dealt with by establishing new procedures, let’s give students options, flexibility is good, these tools are so neat, etc.
I see plenty of evidence that this is a prevailing line of thought in too many circles, and it’s a line of thought that in my mind would be a death knell to real education. Online education is no substitute for classroom learning; it’s utterly inferior and therefore rife with inequity. I have hard time describing it as education at all. But I think we have a fight on our hands if we’re going to sustain that as a prevailing sentiment and slow the online teaching juggernaut. I wish my brother’s report of failure was right, but I doubt it.