March/April 2000

Alfie Kohn on "The Deadly Effects of Tougher Standards"

Every month, the Harvard Graduate School of Education invites a number of educators, researchers,community activists, and policymakers, from across the country to talk about such topics as school violence, multiple intelligences, teaching science, and the politics of school reform. We are pleased to be able to provide you with an edited transcript of some of these talks.

Below is an edited transcript of a talk that took place at the Harvard Graduate School of Education on November 3, 1999. For easier reading, we have divided the transcript into the following sections:

Alfie Kohn's Talk
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Alfie Kohn's Talk

Alfie Kohn: Let me start with a study, and invite you to reflect on its significance and meaning. In the early nineties, Cheryl Flink and Ann Bogiano and their colleagues took a bunch of teachers in Colorado and invited them to teach a given task to their students.

The teachers were divided into two groups. Those in the first were told, "You are going to be held accountable for raising standards; specifically, we expect that your students will be able to do well on a test on this material." And the second group of teachers were told, "See if you can facilitate your kids' understanding of this task." The task was identical in both. All the teachers were then "set free" to teach the kids, and then all the kids were tested.

It was a fairly conventional task test. Nevertheless, the results showed markedly inferior performance for the kids who had been taught under the standards and accountability condition. On bottom line measures of quality, standards and accountability, as a framework in which to teach, led to learning that was not as effective. Why?

For some of you, that result may be counter-intuitive. For others of you, it makes perfect sense. But I'd invite you to reflect on this for a second. Why would the students taught by teachers who were told they had to raise standards end up not learning the material as well? And I mean that not as a rhetorical question. I want to hear your voices, right here in the beginning. If anybody has a hypothesis, I'd be eager to entertain it. There's no right answer, needless to say, here. Any possible suggestions as to why that might have happened?

AK (in response to a question from the audience): It made the teachers and the students feel inferior, to the extent they were aware of the condition they were in. I'm not sure that was the case, but that's a provocative idea.

Possibly, stress or anxiety levels went up for the teachers in the first group, and the hidden premise, if I'm getting you right, is that as a result of stress or anxiety, we would expect less effective teaching.

(inaudible reply)

AK: When you teach to a test rather than teaching kids, whatever that means when you operationalize it, it might have differential effects on the quality of instruction. Yes?

The motivational level of the kids and the way they approach the task might have in some way been indirectly affected by the teachers having been put in a different condition.

Another study may shed some light on this. A study done in Upstate New York did not look, as an outcome variable, at how well the students did on a test; instead, they looked at how the teachers taught under each of those two conditions.

In essence, they found that the teachers in the first condition became drill sergeants, removing virtually any opportunity for the kids to participate actively in their own learning. In effect, the teachers were controlled and they responded by becoming controlling. This is an effect we've seen even in corporations where, as it turns out, middle managers who are most tightly regulated by their superiors turn out to be most controlling of their subordinates.

On the one hand, that might strike you as a kind of paradox: You know what it feels like to feel controlled from above? Why would you ever do that to someone else? On the other hand, it may not be so paradoxical but perfectly predictable that people often do unto others as has been done onto them.

Forty years ago, John Holt wrote, "One ironical consequence of the drive for so-called higher standards in schools is that the children are too busy to think." Forty years ago he saw it coming. I want to argue tonight that he was more prescient, and to a more alarming degree, than he ever could have known, and that these days we are facing what can be called without fear of hyperbole an educational emergency in this country. The irony is that the emergency has been created in large part, or at least exacerbated, in the name of raising standards. It is not in spite of the standards and accountability movement that we're facing such a dire circumstance with respect to learning, but precisely because of it--so that, in fact, we may be lowering standards in the name of raising them.

Now, I think in most parts of the country, almost uniformly among elected officials, corporate officials who are granted a disproportionate voice in shaping the means and ends of education in this country, and among journalists who cover education for a living, it is still accepted that whatever is done in schools in the name of raising standards or ensuring accountability must be a good thing.

The only people who by and large are protesting this and raising a dissenting voice are those who are professional educators. In the last year or two, a growing number of parents and students have begun to catch on to what is actually going on. "Raising standards" is more or less equivalent to political slogans like "law and order." I remember the 1969 presidential campaign, in which that slogan was used to harpoon the democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey. And there are remarkable similarities between the two, beginning with an exaggeration of the problem, then a misanalysis of its causes, and, finally, solutions that actually make the problem worse.

I want to argue that there are five fatal flaws in the whole tougher standards movement. But I have to make an important distinction. The word "standards" is used for many purposes and with many definitions.

I've been thinking lately about the distinction between horizontal and vertical standards. By horizontal standards, I mean guidelines that help teachers and students shift the pedagogy in a classroom so that they're able to teach and learn in more effective ways.

An example of this would be the NSTM math standards that were offered about ten years ago, the idea being to help students understand mathematical concepts instead of being turned into human calculators.

Now, the horizontal standards don't disturb me, providing that they coincide with what I think the best research, theory, and practice suggest are good ways of teaching, and that they are offered as guidelines for teachers, rather than rammed into classrooms as a kind of fiat. Vertical standards, by contrast, do very little to change the way that teaching and learning happens in a constructive direction. It more or less says, we'll continue to do the same things but we're going to do it tougher, louder, stronger, meaner, for more time, with tougher standards and more tests.

It's the vertical standards I'm concerned about. So, while some individuals lately have been pointing out with great indignation that some good things are happening in classrooms in the name of standards, I think we have to distinguish between the different kinds of standards.

The vertical standards are what I mean when I talk about the tougher standards movement. The first thing that I think is wrong with it is that it gets school reform wrong. Even if you like the content, the way it's been talked about by governors, by corporations, by newspapers, and so on--the way that the change is made is itself problematic because it's not a matter of working with education, it is primarily about doing things to them. And as a friend of mine in management likes to say: People don't resist change, they resist being changed.

There is a temptation to coerce people who have less power than you have and make them do what you know is right. Every parent, teacher, administration, and corporate manager knows the temptation to do exactly that: You simply use what force and leverage you have to compel compliance. The extent to which we resist that temptation tells a lot about us and our experience. Often I find myself thinking of Winston Churchill's famous comment that "democracy is the worst system of government except for all the others," and that really strikes me whenever I read the newspaper about education reform.

The notion of accountability, in theory, doesn't disturb me. But these days, accountability has come to be a code word for more control over what happens in classrooms by people who are not in classrooms. And it has approximately the same effect on learning that a noose has on breathing. Not just because of the content of the reform, but the way it's done. It's based on a psychologically naive set of assumptions about human motivation and psychology, and the assumption that some combination of carrots and sticks, incentives and threats, will simply compel people to do what is right, despite the fact that an enormous collection of evidence suggests that people do not tend to respond well, especially on meaningful tasks, to threats and fear.

I'm reminded of a bumper sticker I saw in a classroom. It said, "The beatings will continue until morale improves." I think of that whenever I see that kind of heavy-handed, top-down approach to school reform. "You get your school in order, with your test scores up, otherwise you miss out on the bonuses, and funding, and we may even take you over. Since, of course, we in the state government know far more about pedagogy than you do in the classroom."

But the flip side, the use of what are, in effect, bribes(called incentives for improvement, whereby teachers are given bonuses or entire schools have their funding increased when they do what someone else decides is appropriate(turns out to be counterproductive just because of what we know of how research works. One of the most thoroughly replicated findings in the field of social psychology states, the more you reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.

The implication of high-stakes testing and the whole idea of using incentives to compel teachers and schools to get their act in order is based on the notion that teachers, principals, and students could be doing a great job at teaching and learning, but they somehow decided not to, and so it has to be bribed or threatened out of them. It's not that they need a new approach to understanding or need resources, they just need a carrot or a stick, and then they will do it.

If that premise sounds ludicrous when made explicit, I invite you to reflect on whether it is not exactly the premise that lies hidden beyond the notion of high-stakes reform. The study that I mentioned suggesting lower-level performance in the accountability condition speaks directly to the futility of attempting to do school reform by just mandating change. Tougher standards and the practices that follow from that are not about excellence. They are primarily about an approach to management and change borrowed from Frederick W. Taylor and his scientific principles of management.

It reaches perhaps its highest level of absurdity when you are not merely threatening adults, but kids. "You learn the stuff on this test, or you won't get a diploma." Or, "You will not move onto fourth grade unless you jump through our hoops," putting aside all of the research (with only one exception, to the best of my knowledge) overwhelmingly demonstrates that the worst thing to do for an at-risk student is flunk him or her and make that student repeat the grade. It's part of the same bribes-and-threats philosophy.

So, I would argue that if the content is unobjectionable the dominant methodology of school reform reflected in the tougher standards approach is problematic.

Second, I think the tougher standards movement gets the whole notion of improvement wrong, that it amounts to confusing harder with better or, in some cases, even more with better. Henry David Thoreau once said, "It is not enough to be busy; the question is, what are we busy about?" And yet that message seems to be lost on people who seem to think that if we simply offer more of what we're already doing, that we'll somehow change it.

Closely related to that is, "not just more, but harder." The Commission of Education in Colorado said recently: "Unless you get bad results, it's highly doubtful you've done anything useful with your tests. Low scores have become synonymous with good tests." This is the kind of comment that makes satire obsolete.

Now, on the first pass, you realize that just a harder test or classroom is not necessarily a better one. You can have something that's too tough just as surely as you can have something that's too easy. But I'm arguing more than that, not just that we should move it to a moderate or optimal level of difficulty. I'm arguing that the whole continuum lacks usefulness as a primary way of judging what's going on in schools.

Most of the time, public officials, corporate officials, and reporters talking about raising standards are talking about making education more rigorous when, contextually, what they seem to mean is making it more onerous. That's not the same thing.

John Dewey got it right earlier than most of us: "The value of what students do," he wrote, "resides in its connection with a stimulation of greater thoughtfulness, not in the greater strain it imposes." Am I in favor of challenge? Sure, if by challenge you mean a more durable, richer, more authentic approach to education, in which kids with growing proficiency and interest pursue complicated answers to their own questions about themselves and the world. If that's what you mean by moving in the direction of a more rigorous education, I'll sign that petition.

But that's typically not what's going on, and it often tends to move in exactly the opposite direction. For example, advanced placement courses are usually the hardest courses in a given high school, but that does not mean they are the best courses, or that they are better than the other courses. Most advanced placement courses are driven by lectures and textbooks and, more importantly, by the imperative to raise scores on a fixed test.

To that extent, if students find a given topic to be of overwhelming interest and want to pursue it deeply, they typically cannot, because the test demands that they have to quickly move on and superficially cover a lot of other material. But people often assume that the hardest course in the school is the best course in the school, and that's what I want to call into question here. The difficulty level has been raised. People pat themselves on the back for having made tests a lot harder, to the point that students often flunk them. In Virginia, 97 percent of the schools did meet the new standards of learning, across the board. And in Virginia, Nevada, Alabama, and other states, the response to a lot of kids failing was to make the tests even more difficult the following year [laughter].

When it comes to difficulty level, my guiding star is my friend Deborah Meier's comment, which she called Meier's Mandate: "No student should be expected to meet an academic requirement that a cross-section of adults in the community cannot." Kohn's corollary to Meier's Mandate is: "People who talk piously about making schools competitive in the 21st century and intensifying accountability and standards should not merely be required to take those tests themselves, but to have their scores published in the newspaper."

This is not just a cheap gag line. The reality is that very few of us could pass what is being proposed in New York, Massachusetts, and other states as a requirement for students to know. It's not just that the tests are ridiculously hard in some cases, but that they're simply ridiculous, because they fail to capture what most of us, in our everyday professional and personal lives, implicitly or explicitly value and honor and think education ought to be about.

A third concern is that the tougher standards movement gets teaching and learning wrong--the pedagogy, so to speak.

Many of the standards in states begin with a sentence that says, "All students will be able to..." So again, before you even look at how the sentence ends, what you're looking at is a requirement for uniformity, to be cemented by frequent testing. When that's done, especially in the early grades, the assumption is that all students do and should develop at exactly the same rate, which is bizarre from a developmental point of view, and prescriptively poisonous.

For example, the New York Times described the new grade-by-grade standards being offered of what your child should be expected to know in 1st grade, 2nd grade, and 3rd grade. You will be interested to learn that E.D. Hirsch, Jr., was quoted in that article, as was, for balance, Diane Ravich. Both said that the standards were not specific enough.

When asked if there were going to be national standards and what they should be like, Harold Howe II, Lecturer Emeritus at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and formerly the U.S. Commissioner of Education, summarized a century of wisdom in four words and said: "As vague as possible." Not because he doesn't value rigor, but because he understands that if you expect all kids to do the same thing at the same time, you fail to honor difference in situations as well as differences between your child and mine.

These days you can't even talk about having a standard like being able to write a coherent essay, because that's dismissed by traditionalists driving this movement as being fuzzy or fluffy(as though specificity were equivalent to excellence.

The result of this is that it drives a very superficial kind of teaching, reminding me of a kind of quick tour, or coverage-based pedagogy. I think of the stereotypical American family, tourists in Europe: Their rental car screeches to a halt in front of some ruin. Somebody jumps out and takes a bunch of photographs and then herds the kids back in the car. The kids complain, "We didn't get to see anything!" The parents tell them, "You'll see it at home," and they move on.

I mean, this is the kind of mindset that leads to, as Howard Gardner puts it, trying to cover everything from Plato to NATO in one year. That's a problem. But beyond the specificity and uniformity of this, the fundamental pedagogy that is supported by most of the people driving for tougher standards is the old "bunch-o-fax" approach, the notion that kids are empty vessels into which isolated skills and forgettable facts are poured.

Let's just take one example of the fruits of this kind of traditional teaching.

We all know about TIMSS, the third international math and science study: the worse the results are, the bigger the headlines. There are some questions about the methodology of that international comparison of American students to their counterparts in other countries.

But it seemed pretty clear that even on an absolute scale(who cares if you're No. 24 on a list of 25, if everybody's getting it? Who cares if you're No. 1, if nobody's getting it?

Even when you look at absolute measures, and even if you put aside your concerns about the methodology, TIMSS suggests that U.S. students, by the time they get to be of high-school age, are in trouble with respect to mathematical understanding.

I think there's a message here. That message, the fact that our kids didn't do very well, was on page one of almost every newspaper in the country. What did not make it even into the interior of the papers that I read was what William Schmidt at Michigan State University and the other analysts who directed this study concluded was among the chief reasons for American students' failure (and I paraphrase): It's because the back to basics folks have won.

It is precisely because of a curriculum that is more about following skills than understanding the significance of what they're doing that, when contrasted with mathematical pedagogy in other countries, highlights why our kids are in trouble. Along with that are teachers who work through, step-by-step, the recipe or algorithm of a math problem, and then give kids 50 more just like it to imitate(an exercise that helps neither the kids who understood nor those who didn't. And yet, in the same breath, the new Democratic governor of California talks about the need to raise standards. He then talks about the need to go back to basics(those two are like twins in the minds of people who are making educational policy.

One of the messages that we have to get out is that if we are in trouble, it's precisely because of the traditionalism of pedagogy and the failure to understand how kids actually learn.

There are those who use the banner of standards and are genuinely trying to improve education in the right direction(that is, the direction of which I approve. In those cases, with new standards and the like, I invite you to think, if they are not vulnerable on this concern, do they check out with respect to the others? For example, are they trying to mandate high-stakes performance assessments, or simply reach around teachers to try to improve, or at least change, what's going on in the schools, and to what extent is difficulty a signal feature of how they judge their success?

View these not as an indictment but as a set of questions to ask about people who claim to be improving standards with each of these four. There is, of course, much more to be said about good and bad pedagogy.

Next, I think the movement gets assessment wrong. The vast majority of people who are not educators but who talk about raising standards mean neither more nor less by that than increasing the scores on standardized tests.

There are bad standardized tests, and then there are worse standardized tests. A set of criteria to distinguish them is not that difficult to come up with. If the test is multiple choice, primarily or exclusively, it does not allow students to explain answers and limits the extent to which we can understand what they understand.

If the test is timed, it values speed more than thoroughness and thoughtfulness. If the test does not reflect deep understanding of ideas and a commitment to explore ideas, then even if it's an essay test, it may be problematic. By the way, at least 20 states send their essays to be graded in former warehouses in North Carolina, where temporary workers go through them with incentives to grade them more quickly, often spending seconds on a given essay to determine what score it gets. So the fact that it's not multiple choice is not necessarily a sign that we're moving forward.

If the testing program gives students tests every year, we have a problem in terms of what will probably happen to the curriculum and the extent to which we are then implicitly saying, every kid must be here by this grade and then there by the next grade.

If the testing program is testing kids younger than about seven or eight, virtually every organization and individual I know of who is an expert in early childhood development says that is unacceptable, given the limits of such tests to measure what kids know, as well as the atrocity of expecting children to develop at a uniform pace.

Then there are tests and testing programs that are norm-referenced, which are tests that were never designed to tell you whether students know what they should or whether schools are doing a good job. A norm-referenced test, like the Iowa Test to Basic Skills, Comprehensive Test to Basic Skills, the Stanford, the California, the Metropolitan, were designed for one purpose only, and that was to artificially spread out the scores as much as possible so you can sort the kids like potatoes. The purpose of these tests is not to find out what students know; it is only to rank them, not to rate them.

The usefulness of that would appeal primarily to people who care about whether we're No. 1 in our school district or state, not to people who want all kids to learn, or even to know how well your kids are learning. But when you then take a test like that and use it as a criterion for deciding which teachers get bonuses or, as in the case of the nightmare scenario of Chicago public schools, whether kids go onto 4th grade, it is educational malpractice. Even if you've never heard of a norm-referenced test, I think it's pretty clear what they are, and how little sense it makes to use them.

The main effect of the standardized testing movement, with the aid of high-stakes testing, is to cause the test to drive the curriculum. A number of people supporting the tougher standards movement make no apologies about that.

It suggests that educators and teachers are not educators at all but mere technicians. Their job is to carry out the mandate that has been set by the state board of education, or the state legislature, or the conglomerates that design the tests themselves and the materials that allow schools to do better on them.

But, when you look at the nature of many of these tests the news gets far worse, and the extent to which testing drives the curriculum is the extent to which educators across the country are increasingly being driven, to frustration, rage, and sometimes even voluntary retirement.

In Wisconsin, a teacher who is renowned in his small community for the kind of student-centered projects he created for middle students, stood up at a community meeting one evening and announced: "I used to be a good teacher." He explained: "I don't do those projects you may have heard about anymore. Now I give kids a textbook to read, and I give them quizzes. And the reason I do that is because I'm being held accountable to raise test scores." The mentality of tougher standards had won and, to that extent, the students had lost.

In an op. ed in the Boston Globe, I gave an example of a teacher right here in Cambridge, MA, who talked to me about a very exciting project that she had come up with, in which kids become experts on something they didn't even understand what expertise might be about. It was the kind of experience, based on how she described it, that kids look back on, years later, as a high point of their school years. She can't do it anymore because of the MCAS, because that project is not going to be covered on the test, the Industrial Revolution is.

The extent to which testing is squeezing the intellectual life out of classrooms, in this state and across the country, cannot be exaggerated. I am on the road constantly, hearing stories like this from some of the best educators, and the better the teacher, the more destructive the effect of the MCAS, and the MEEP, and the ISAT, and the TAS, and the Regents, and the LEAP, and all their pernicious siblings in other states.

The extent to which we teach to the test is a sign of the invalidity of the test itself. You can't even tell us what we want to know about the natural condition of the school, because people are, sometimes of their own accord, and more commonly with a gun to their head, doing everything they can not to improve education but to weigh scores.

And if we get no other message across to our friends and neighbors and colleagues, it is that moving to raise scores on tests like the MCAS pulls in one direction; moving for excellence pulls in the other direction. And the MCAS isn't even the worst test in the country.

I come, finally, to what for some people will be a less obvious critique. Besides getting school reform improvement, teaching, learning, and assessment wrong, I think the tougher standards movement gets the notion of motivation wrong--that is, the psychological issues that help us understand how and why kids learn.

That performance and learning are not the same thing is one of the most intriguing findings to come out of educational psychology "laboratories," and specifically the work of people like Carol Dweck at Columbia University, Carol Ames, who's now head of the College of Education at Michigan State, the late John Nichols, who was at the University of Illinois, Chicago, before his untimely death a few years ago, Carol Midgly, and others.

John Nichols called it "the difference between a task orientation and an ego orientation." When you get a kid focusing on learning, or the task, that kid is ideally, wholly engrossed, in thinking about how to build a working telescope, or how to make a poem that grabs the reader from the very first line, or figuring out why there always seems to be trouble breaking out in the Balkans.

A student who is thinking about ego or performance is thinking, "How am I doing at this task?" And there is an enormous gulf that separates a focus on what kids are doing from a focus on how well they're doing.

The research from Dweck, Nichols, Midgly, Ames, and others suggests about five different problems that occur when you overemphasize achievement and results and standards. As if it's not bad enough that I'm calling into question the notion of standards, I'm also suggesting that we need to rethink what's done when people talk about improving results in schools.

What we are doing these days, in increasingly lower grades, is focusing on performance and achievement levels rather than on the content of what it is they're doing.

From a parent's point of view, imagine a child who comes home with an essay. On the one hand, a parent might say, "What did you get on it?" Or, "What did the teacher think of it?" Such a parent is concerned primarily with performance. Distinguish that parent from one whose first question is something like, "How did you decide to pick this topic?" assuming you were lucky enough to be in a classroom where you got to pick. Or, "Did you know what you were going to say at the end, what conclusion you would reach even before you started? Or did your mind change as you were writing it?"

Such a parent is supporting learning and is more on the task side of this divide. When schools, districts, and states become preoccupied with standards, performance, and achievement, here are the things that are likely to happen.

Number one: Kids are less interested in what they're doing. They come to see learning as a chore. Now it's not stuff to figure out, it's stuff they must do better at--a completely different mindset. The extent to which you value not only kids' proficiency at tasks, but also their desire to keep learning, will be the extent to which you find this extremely troubling. But continuing motivation to learn has never shown up on any standardized test or other measure of school success that I have found.

Number two: When you over-emphasize performance you get kids who tend to attribute their success or failure to the factors over which they have little, if no, control, like ability. A kid who does very well in school might say, "I did well because I studied, I made an effort." Or, that student may say, "I did well because the test was easy" or "because I was lucky" or "because I'm just smart."

So here's the interesting punch line. The research suggests that when you put too much emphasis on achievement or results, kids become more likely to attribute their success or failure not to effort but to innate ability, one of the least constructive ways to make sense of this.

Here's a third problem with over-emphasizing performance. Kids tend to become totally flummoxed when they fail. While they're doing okay, there seems to be no problem, but as soon as they hit a bump in the road, they come to think of themselves as helpless to do anything about the failure.

If the kid had gotten a 40 and beat himself up over it, the implication might be that the response is appropriate. But it's not where you draw the line between okay and not okay, it's how bold the line is drawn and the salience of this constant imperative to keep achieving and looking at results.

What else is wrong with overemphasizing performance? Kids are likely to pick the easiest possible task, if given a choice. Now, we've all seen students who don't challenge themselves enough. There's a truly short-sighted and pernicious ad, taken out by the business-led Advertising Council, where a little kid begs you, "Challenge me." But the irony is that the same people who are complaining that kids cut corners and do as little as they can get away with are often pursuing a strategy that leads, predictably, to that very result.

Here's what that kid would say if he was sufficiently assertive: "Uh-uh. Don't lay this on me, when you told me that the point was to get an A. When you told me, Governor, that you want to see results, what you are saying to me is, 'Oh, by the way, this is not about intellectual exploration.' You are saying, 'Please, don't reach beyond what you're comfortably capable of doing, and take risks.' You are saying, 'This is not about intellectual development, this is about achievement, this is about high grades and scores.'"

Well, "duh," he adds, "the easier the task, the better chance I'll give you what you want." The hypocrisy of blaming kids for behaving rationally in response to a dysfunctional system is astonishing.

And finally, the fifth effect, according to research, of over-emphasizing performance is that the quality of learning itself tends to decline. If you are measuring by temporary facts, definitions, and algorithms that have been retained long enough to do well on a test, then I have to concede that a performance-crazy environment may lead to higher performance on those measures. But if you have more ambitious criteria for deciding what it is we're looking for in schools; if you want kids who are able to make connections among apparently disparate ideas; make distinctions among things that appear to be the same; to think critically and creatively, then the research suggests that the quality of learning goes down when you over-emphasize achievement, results, standards, and performance. So, use this as a checklist the next time you hear people talking about the need for tougher standards in accountability.

We are in an interesting time in educational history in this country. It seems that we are in one of the most reactionary periods in terms of education. But with respect to the standards and testing preoccupation, a counter-reaction is in the process of being formed.

The question is, "To what extent are teachers willing to become active in this, and what has been done in other parts of the world and is now beginning to be done increasingly by parents and the students themselves?" You know how many standardized tests they take in Japan? If you don't count the tests they take at age sixteen to get into the University, my best sources tell me there are zero. And some people, including Kathryn Lewis and others, who have looked carefully at Japanese education attribute the vaunted proficiency of Japanese students precisely to the fact that they don't have standardized tests.

What's interesting to me, as an activist, is not just that Japan does well without standardized tests, but why it has no standardized tests. And the reason is that, some years ago, the Japanese teachers, through their union, refused to administer a standardized testing program that the government unveiled. The Japanese do not have a reputation, collectively, for being troublemakers, for what that's worth, but they simply refused, so to speak, to break the shrink-wrap because they knew of its dire impact on teaching and learning. And they won.

And that is a lesson, I think, that cannot be spread too often in the ranks of educators, who are often afraid of being political. They have come to see the standards movement as being like the weather, something you just have to accommodate yourself to.

I've been getting this reaction a lot from other people, including journalists, who say, in effect, You know, for better or worse the standards movement is here to stay, so how are you going to live with it? The only thing that matters is whether it is for better or for worse. And if we conclude it is for worse(we would no sooner accept this as a fact of life than we would accept the fact that my daughter has to grow up to stand behind a man, rather than being successful in her own right. In other examples we see how appalling it is to make that claim, but with standards we're supposed to take it on its face value.

But, some people are not doing that. In Massachusetts there have been some courageous acts of civil disobedience on the part of students, and occasionally their parents, in Cambridge, in Newton, in Danvers, of people standing up to the test and saying, We want our schools to be excellent, not giant test prep centers. In Danvers, they paid a price for that. The kids were suspended. And that heavy-handed response from the administration helped to radicalize the parents in that community as no talk I or you could give, ever could have.

In Michigan, significant proportions of parents are holding their kids back from the high school proficiency tests there. In Columbus, OH, three amazing moms have banded together to organize and challenge the Ohio proficiency tests, which are now becoming high-stakes tests. Students in the Whitney Young magnet school in Chicago, and in a very different school in Marin County, California, have deliberately flunked the test as a protest. In a little rural town in Wisconsin, high school students are refusing to be part of it. Parents are organizing in Wisconsin, in Virginia, and elsewhere not only against the testing, but against the whole standards mentality of which the testing is a part.

In fact, in June, the parents won a significant victory in Wisconsin that for me is an inspirational example for Massachusetts. They rolled back what had been proposed in the legislature as a high-stakes graduation test, and it is no longer the only graduation criterion, which is, when you think about it, indefensible, that regardless of a student's academic record, one test determined whether he or she gets a diploma.

The educators themselves are beginning to stand up. A brave teacher in Harwich, here Cape Cod, said, "I won't be there on the day we give out the MCAS, if for no other reason than because the test is covering stuff that I haven't had a chance to cover in the classroom." How dare you. Or, what I dream of now is where, in classrooms and schools across the country, teachers begin to organize themselves and say, We're going out on a limb here, so let me ask you this. If 60 percent--or pick your own percent--of these teachers, of your colleagues, in this school boycotted the administration of the test, would you go along? It's hypothetical and already we're giving actual answers, which is great.

And we're saying, Would you do it? There is strength in numbers, you know, because they can't fire all of us, and I think that could be a powerful tool, providing the teachers were savvy in a public relations campaign in which they made it very clear. This is not because we're afraid of being held accountable, but because this testing is dumbing down the schools. And that can often be an uphill battle.

We have to educate real estate agents. I just wrote an article, for the first and probably last time in my life, for American Realtor magazine, in which I said to them, Every time you sell a neighborhood on the basis of test scores, you're making our schools a little bit worse. Here's why.

I always invite teachers around the country to request meetings with the editorial staff of their local newspapers, to sit down and say, When you publish charts that rank schools--which is bad enough--but rank them on the basis of standardized tests, it becomes harder for us to educate your kids.

Jim Poppam says, If we're going to run those charts, at least let's run them where they belong in the newspaper, in the sports section.

We have to reach out to people, to say that there are better ways of understanding whether our schools are being successful and whether our kids are learning. Some of them are hard to quantify, and I think often of Linda McNeil's comment, from Rice University, when she said, "Measurable outcomes may be the least significant results of learning."

Be a buffer. Wherever you are on the food chain of education, your job is to absorb pressure from above and not pass it on. If you're a superintendent, or someone else in the central office, and you're getting pressure from the legislature or the school board to do stuff that you know is not about good learning, but just about raising test scores, do everything you can, short of being fired, to absorb that pressure without passing it on to your building principals. If you're a principal and you're getting pressure from the central office, absorb that pressure without passing it on to your teachers. If you're a teacher getting pressure from the principal, make sure you don't pass it on to your kids. Do all you can to be part of the solution, in the meantime.

Last point: It disturbs me greatly that a number of people claiming to stand for equity and the all-important goal of closing the gap between black and white schools, between rich and poor districts, are often uncritically using standardized tests as the metric, thereby legitimating these tests, to the detriment of everyone.

More importantly, when I hear people talk about higher expectations, I always respond, higher expectations to do what? Worksheets better? Because what really matters is the quality of the curriculum itself. What I fear is going on right now, in the name of raising standards, of course, is that we are turning second-rate schools into third-rate schools. And if you wander the halls in Baltimore, or Houston or Chicago and watch the drill-and-skill approach that has now become accelerated and systematized, in an effort not to improve education, but to raise test scores, even though those schools were not in such great shape to begin with, in many cases they may be becoming worse because of the teaching and learning implications that are tied to the kind of assessment that's going on.

And that should outrage all of us. Dorothy Strickland, an African American professor at Rutgers, said, "Skills-based instruction, the type to which most children of color are subjected, tends to foster low-level uniformity and subvert academic potential." More of that kind of instruction is now being done in the name of accountability.