What Time Is It? It's Exam Time! Ladies and Gentlemen, Start Your Blue Books!

Cowabunga, Buffalo Bob!

Truth be told, I am actually writing this post while proctoring my exam.  You would think a Tenured Radical like myself wouldn't even believe in exams, wouldn't you?

Wrong.  True, I think this generation of students comes to college so stressed-out, and so tested-out, that in many ways it is an act of mercy not to plan any kind of evaluation that awakens their anxieties (see this article for the use of therapy dogs during exam period at Tufts University.)  In fact, here at Zenith, students have been heard to complain that quizzes (particularly of the "Pop!" variety) and exams are "like high school" and unworthy of college-level scholars.  The desire to administer such forms of evaluation, it is implied, reveals the professor hirself as not quite cool for school. ("Like, man, if you really knew me, you would know what grade to give me!")

And yet I give exams, and here are the reasons why:

• Taking exams is a skill.  For the vast majority of professional careers, in graduate school, and for a variety of other occupations, these very same students will be asked to take exams.  Oh sure, some of them will be self-administered, but most of them will be taken in a large impersonal room, written by hand, and timed.  Any career -- from soldier, to lawyer, to electrician, to police officer, to medical doctor, to the State Department requires at least one exam -- and sometimes numerous exams, taken throughout one's work life.  Many careers require periodic re-certification; many others require exams for promotion.  The idea that graduating high school liberates most people, of any social class, from test-taking is a lie.

• As long as we teach surveys, making sense of -- and knowing what you think about -- a period, a field of study, or an area of expertise requires time set aside for comprehensive study.  The exam, in this case, becomes a means to an end.  Let's be honest:  even our best students prepare erratically for classes, and students of all kinds work in bursts that are in many ways governed by the many disparate courses and the work schedules to which they are responsible.  The act of studying, at its best, brings all of these pieces that have been acquired erratically (or not yet acquired at all) together in a whole, at the end of which (ideally) a student has a building block to go on to more advanced work, to research, or to simply salt away for whenever it becomes useful.

• In the humanities and social sciences, exams allow students who are not yet sophisticated thinkers, or particularly good writers, to work hard, do well, and be proud of themselves.  At all colleges, equally intelligent students enter with different capacities and with different skill sets.  Students who work hard and want to achieve deserve some reward and encouragement for their efforts: if every assignment that they are graded on requires excellent writing skills, or the capacity to structure a complex argument, this means that under prepared students will not get credit for what they are achieving even if they are growing as intellectuals through the act of diligent study.  In other words, there will be some lag time between the acquisition of sophisticated reading skills and the capacity to reproduce and build creatively on what has been read.  This means that many students who are learning and growing will have difficulty showing that unless they are given exams geared towards revealing what they have learned.

• Let's tell the truth:  many faculty don't give exams because it is a nice way to artificially shorten the semester.  A papers-only class, a series of short quizzes, a take-home or final paper due on the last day of classes -- all of these tactics send certain of our colleagues home a week, or even two weeks, early.  At Zenith this is illegal, but it happens anyway.  Little things reveal it, like the student who wrote to a colleague that but for a pesky exam in that class s/he would be able to leave town slightly before the end of classes to (and I quote) "maximize boy-friend time."  Why is this bad for students?  Well, two reasons.  One is the absence of any of the benefits stated above.  The other is that this puts heavy pressure on the final two weeks of the semester, and in fact, stresses students out more than if they had reading period and exam week to finish up in a more orderly way.

 On a final note, I attended a party the other night at which a number of colleagues and I waxed nostalgic about (wait for it) our "favorite exams, ever!"  This was, just to be clear, our favorite exam that we ever took.  Mine was an oral exam in eighteenth century French history with John Merriman, my sophomore year at Oligarch.  Feel free to contribute yours in the comments section

God it's fun to group up nerdy.

Barack Is (Not) Responsible For Making All Things Good: The Radical Disputes The Proposal That There Is An "Obama Effect" On Education

Much as I would like Barack Obama to sprinkle magic dust all over the country, fixing racism, poverty, and absolutely everything we hated about the Bushies, each policy question will have to be tackled thoughtfully, one by one. Today's topic is the national education agenda.

A crucial issue here is the continuing mania for using public school children as a vast pool of customers for corporations specializing in both mass curriculum distribution and in the endless testing through which students -- on pain of humiliation, summer school, and being held back a grade -- are asked to regurgitate these educational products. (I use the phrase "educational products" consciously: currently, a standard curriculum in the United States is to education what Cheez Whiz is to cheese.) The sad backstory of test scores going up in any given school are the number of students who drop out, or are encouraged to drop out, because of their low test scores.

No Child Left Behind, built around a testing mandate, is a great example of "an expensive government program" (to use a distinction our new President made himself) that does not work and ought to be eliminated. While few federal tax dollars are spent directly on NCLB, its unfunded mandates put a huge financial burden on state and local education budgets. Under systems driven by high-stakes testing, students learn by rote, rather than becoming critical thinkers, many students drop out altogether rather than be left back a grade, and we are no closer to creating equal access to a good education than we were a decade ago. And yet, today's New York Times buries this issue with yet another assertion that the symbolism of an Obama presidency, rather than radical policy interventions, will fix what is broken in our nation by lifting up the self-esteem of African-American people. Our paper of record reports that education researchers tested a group of children before and after the presidential nomination. The test before the nomination demonstrated what is commonly called the "achievement gap" between African-American and white students. But in the test after the inauguration, presumably because their self-esteem was raised by watching an African -American man become president, the African-American students stepped up their game. On that second test, racial differences in the children's test scores were "statistically insignificant."

This, the researchers imply, potentially reinforces previous studies showing that white students do better on standardized tests because they believe that they will succeed; and that African-American students do significantly less well on the same tests because they believe they will do poorly. I am sure I am over-simplifying a large body of research, but as a historian, to design one's research around such a notion seems pointless, particularly since this longstanding belief has never done anything to actually make Americans a better educated people. I am reminded of Booker T. Washington's firm belief that education was useless to formerly enslaved people until they had acquired self-esteem through physical and moral uplift (personal hygiene, and specifically proper deployment of the toothbrush, was one way to develop self-esteem; another was to learn how to make an excellent brick.) Such arguments have been by no means solely the province of African-American social scientists and educators. Post-1945 white liberals like historian Kenneth Stampp were entranced by the notion that persistent social inequalities are a result of low self-esteem, rather than ongoing racial and class inequality. By the 1940's, self-esteem arguments had moved into progressive, anti-racist social science through the black doll-white doll test designed by influential African-American psychologists Mamie and Kenneth Clark, used as evidence in Briggs v. Elliott (1952) and other lower court cases folded into Brown v. Board of Education (1954). As Waldo E. Martin has noted, this test was not without critics on both sides of the issue, many of whom saw methodological flaws in the Clarks' experiments. However, the gravity of the moral issues at stake, Martin writes, meant that arguments about self-esteem resulting from the study nevertheless became powerful visual evidence in what stands out as a classic liberal decision by the Warren court.1

Brown, of course, eliminated de jure segregation, which was important. But it failed to address other educational questions that contribute to what we now call the achievement gap, because the scope of the decision, influential as it was, left undisturbed the connections between segregation, institutional racism and economic inequality. Furthermore highly theatrical demonstrations, filmed and widely distributed, of serious African-American children unerringly choosing the white doll, became one of the great reproaches to liberals of interventions too long delayed and compromises too often made, just as southern whites with hate-twisted faces spitting on African-American grade schoolers is a past that conservatives will have to endure as part of their history. To this day arguments about self-esteem dominate our discussions about the education available to children of color. While not entirely unimportant, they have a tendency to occlude other kinds of questions that should be asked about why our public education system is in such terrible shape.

In the spirit of full disclosure, we at la casa Radical wish that Obama had selected someone for this important Cabinet-level position like Stanford's Linda Darling-Hammond, who was briefly considered for the post and had been chosen to head up Obama's education policy working group. But things could have been much worse. Joel Klein, superintendent of New York City's school system was under consideration, and of course, there is always Michelle Rhee, a strong proponent of free market solutions for public education (read: siphon tax dollars to corporations) right outside the White House gates.

So it could have been much worse than Arne Duncan, formerly CEO (yes, that was his title) of the Chicago Public School system. Time Magazine recently characterized Duncan as friendly to several camps of school reformers. That is all good, and it will help him be effective in a highly contentious and ideology-driven professional world. But one of the challenges Duncan needs to be asked to deal with is the dominance of standardized testing as an assessment method. Under the Bush administration, high-stakes testing has been the centerpiece of education policy. Literally billions of education dollars now go into creating, administering, and grading these tests -- dollars that could go into the teaching of critical thinking; that could be keeping libraries open; that could be funneled into tutoring programs and smaller classes. Perhaps we could use a billion to provide regular dental and health clinics for children in each school so that they can see the blackboard and are not in physical pain in the classroom.

In conclusion, I would argue that the research cited by the New York Times is useful, but probably not in the way the researchers imagined. Forget self-esteem for a minute, as well as the problem of using the so-called achievements of white people (good test-taking skills) as the measure of intellectual success for everyone. If the inauguration testing experiment means anything, it certainly tells us something about the researchers. The resilience of assumptions about the importance of self-esteem in educational research design has caused them to leak information, as if it were an exciting new intellectual path, about a piece of research that even they admit is incredibly scattershot. But more importantly, this little experiment shows that testing children doesn't tell you what they actually know, and therefore, testing is failing at the most basic level that any policy or practice can be evaluated. If test scores are so dramatically affected by social and psychological factors like whether a child is excited that someone of his or her so-called racial group is President of the United States, then in fact, the one thing we know is that standardized tests are a bad tool that do not give us any reliable gauge of whether teachers are teaching well or students are learning.

Cross posted at Cliopatria.

....................................

1 Waldo E. Martin Jr., Brown v. Board of Education: A Brief History With Documents, Bedford Series in History and Culture (New York: MacMillen, 1998), p. 28.