Yesterday in Part Two, I briefly discussed the myriad issues that define our individual opinions about public education. Charter schools are one such issue. Money is a related issue. Centralization, mechanization, and standardization are also closely tied to money issues, and to charter schools.
The fact that children are individuals and do not develop and learn in a standardized manner is, however, in direct conflict with centralization, mechanization, and standardization. The fact that, traditionally, teachers are individuals and do not teach in a standardized manner is also in conflict with centralization, mechanization, and standardization.
My father worked as a school teacher for his entire career. I clearly recall watching him, sitting on the living room couch in the evening, grading essays and tests — surrounded by papers upon which students had scrawled their creative thoughts or quiz answers in pencil, and upon which my father would circle or underline, in red ink, this or that phrase, this or that word, and in the margins, write a suggested improvement. These papers were written by high school students. Fewer than half of them were bound for college in those days — in the 1960s — but my father expected all of them to do their level best at understanding and retaining the skills and knowledge he was working to impart. His comments written to each individual student were, in his opinion, an essential part of his work.
This lengthy process — correcting and grading papers — was uncompensated work in my father’s day. He did it in the evenings and on the weekends, not because he was being paid overtime, but because it needed to be done, and he was the only one available to do it. He did it because, essentially, he cared about his students.
In 1934, IBM hired a former teacher and inventor named Reynold B. Johnson to create a production model of his prototype test scoring machine, to be named the IBM 805, and marketed to schools between 1938 and 1963. Inside the 805 was a contact plate with 750 contacts corresponding to the 750 answer positions on the answer cards. When the cards were fed into the 805 for processing, the machine read the pencil marks by sensing the electrical conductivity of graphite marks from a #2 pencil. A scoring key separated the contacts into two groups, the “rights” and the “wrongs.”
The speed of the IBM 805 was limited only by the operator’s ability to insert the answer cards into the machine and record the scores. An experienced operator could record scores at the rate of about 800 cards per hour. You could, in other words, score the entire student body of an average high school, in one hour.
Mr. Johnson had developed a machine that could identify a certain type of student learning… so long as the students’ learning could be reduced to pencil-filled ovals on a paper card.
In the vast universe of skills, knowledge, habits, and discoveries that can be experienced and acquired by a blossoming human being, the number that can fit into a series of pencil-filled ovals is… well, rather limited. But Mr. Johnson and IBM had now produced a machine that defined what schools could test and score without any human effort, and in doing so, created a revolution in what schools decided to teach and how they would teach it.
The machines did not care about the students, but they could score literally dozens of tests in the time it would have taken my father to score one individual paper. In a world where time is money, a machine can seem, at first, to be the preferred choice.
The machines that now control American education have become somewhat more ‘intelligent’ since the 1960s. With the advent of the internet, the cost to score students — and by proxy, the cost to score teachers and schools and districts — has become embedded in the overall cost of education. According to a 2014 study by Denver-based Augenblick, Palaich and Associates, Colorado state government and school districts spends perhaps $78 million a year on standardized testing, and some kind of standardized testing takes place during every week of the school year.
“Only accounting for direct costs, and not the additional opportunity costs incurred by redirected staff time, in total $70-$90 a student is spent on assessments in Colorado. This is between $61.1 to $78.4 million annually… When considered in the context of a typical school year of 175 days… between 7 percent and 15 percent of time in the school year [is spent] preparing for or taking assessments.”
To put $78 million into some kind of perspective, In budget year 2018-19, Colorado spent over $7.0 billion funding public K-12 schools, mostly via state taxes ($4.5 billion) and local property taxes ($2.4 billion). That suggests that standardized testing amounts to maybe 1% of the total spent on public education. But the overall impact of a machine-guided curriculum on the way education unfolds, and on what type of learning is judged to be valuable, has extracted an incalculable price.
Looking back over the past 25 years, we’ve seen some significant changes in the way children and teens experience our world, and their own education. For one thing, young people witness adults in America as starkly divided into hostile ideological camps that seem completely unable to engage in constructive, civil discourse across political lines.
One might think — if one were thinking about such things — that an effective public education system would produce caring citizens who are able to listen to, and look out for, one another… and understand, and value, a fellow citizen’s different perspective. Apparently, this is not the outcome we are seeing, in 2019, from the way Americans have been raised and educated over the past 50 years or so. Instead, we find ourselves living in an adversarial country where school kids and their teachers walk through metal detectors as they enter their school buildings.
These changes have left some intelligent observers of American education feeling despondent, hopeless, pessimistic — not only about the way education transpires in the 21st century, but also about the overall survival of the human species. One such observer is author Marion Brady, quoted above. Here’s a comment by teacher and education researcher Marion Brady as quoted in “ROAD TO HELL: Onward and Downward”, June 2018.
Our sense of community — “us-ness” — has withered, and with it the ability to solve shared problems. We’re not embarrassed by a level of poverty that makes it almost impossible to adequately educate a quarter of the young. Dominated by corporate interests focused on short-term profit, we refuse to acknowledge the near-certainty of a future that will challenge humankind’s ability to survive. We expect good work from teachers locked at the bottom of a bureaucracy that gives them no voice in and no control over decisions central to their effectiveness…