When Education is a Test

I've been working on finally pulling together the Digital Citizenship curriculum and associated materials.  Coupled with last week's MCAS testing (and the MCAS testing coming up in two weeks), it's prompted some thinking about education standards, comprehensive assessments and high stakes testing.  These continue to be issues vigorously debated in the Ed press among Education thinkers, administrators and critics.

I re-read this blog post, first published in March in Education Week, in which seasoned school superintendent Michael McGill of Scarsdale, NY laments how the good intentions for reform fostered by "A Nation at Risk" over 30 years ago have been hijacked by business leaders and government bureaucrats who have declared public education a failure and seek to apply 'business management' methodologies of accountability, metrics, and competition.

It's an interesting read. McGill acknowledges there is an important place for standardized testing, "but they're used judiciously, and they're not high-stakes."  Interesting, he finishes with a very instructive quote from Michael MacIntyre of the University of Cambridge:

          "[A]n advanced society ... will also find ways of encouraging unmeasurables

            such as curiosity, enthusiasm, and creativity that are crucial to a world-beating

            performance in an uncertain future. An advanced society will have rediscovered

            and acknowledged the fact that the most highly developed skills and learning

            come from the ignition of interest, not the imposition of auditing."