The following is a sample of Unit II: Defund Education found in my upcoming book, TANGENTS, about the state of our education system and the ways we can turn it around.
Like many, the pandemic made me question the last few years of my ambition and determination to change the world or even the education of the youth. In the time away from the classroom, my thoughts gravitated toward the lessons school actually teaches about society and culture: a hidden curriculum.
Evaluations of students create competition between them for valedictorian and scholarships. However, report cards and ranking systems serve a more significant purpose. Grading students based on assessments creates a finality to the work and a punitive system. Students perceive summative assessments of homework, projects, papers, tests, and variations thereupon as a finality to the work completed.
A student achieves mastery when they can complete enough work or score high enough marks to allow them to continue to the next grade level. Yet, this is far from mastery of any subject; it communicates that there is nothing more to learn in the area of interest.
The student has learned what society has deemed important.
This removal of curiosity keeps students from pursuing further knowledge.
Instead, they feel that, upon graduation, education is complete; or for others, real education can begin either in vocation or university.
The mastery these tests assess rarely extends beyond the lowest levels of the revisions made to Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy. While it may have shortcomings, the framework helps us organize our thoughts regardless. These seven levels establish a hierarchy of terms to guide teachers toward teaching and subsequently assessing higher-order thinking.
The lowest levels of Bloom’s are remembering information, while the apex asks students to create original and innovative work. The lower levels are embedded in the student’s ability to accomplish the higher levels. While not all tasks require the highest level of Bloom’s, the prized critical thinking does.
Although teaching the assessment is discouraged, the actual assessment is already unavailable to the teachers.
Instead, general topics are expressed as a number referencing a level of Norman Webb’s Depth of Knowledge rated from one to four on these standardized tests.
A four has the greatest depth of extended thinking in which synthesis and data-driven problem-solving exist. One has the shallowest depth, which is focused on recall and reproduction. Teachers are challenged to reduce an overwhelming and constantly revised series of numbered standards and short-ranked descriptions to a prioritized list, including those achievable within the year before the exam.
Persistent defunding of education has extended to even the grading and interpretation of the assessment used to defund education. Ironically, the cost to grade responses to the assessment’s questions that evaluate and analyze data and arguments is too expensive to pay graders to evaluate and analyze. To remove this cost, the evaluation is reduced to automation. As machines grade multiple-choice answers, the ability to assess the higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy disappears.
Instead, recall and remembering return as the primary focus due to ease, not importance.
So, with constraints on resources—particularly time—teachers enviably reorient the lessons onto the assessment, hopefully justifying funding to keep the school alive. Instructors teach an inch deep and a mile wide to ambitiously cover the content of a biased, ambiguous, and ultimately unknown assessment that only evaluates the shallowest depth of knowledge due to the endless defunding of education.
Defunding education means defunding assessments. Defunding assessments means only machines grade them. Machine grading means assessing: recall, remember, recite, and retain.
Defunding education means: creating, evaluating, analyzing, and applying are not priorities in the competition to not close the school.
Defending education, most importantly public education, against defunding is the only choice we have. Education can be redesigned to reveal the true intention and ambition of adults in power to advocate for a transparent, equitable, and transformative public education system for children.
To not just pass students but to inspire and equip them to shape the world we are passing on to them.
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