Between the rhetorical lines

“This is very convincing stuff,” Poor Elijah assured me as he handed me an article he’d highlighted.

A paragraph later I realized something was up. “But you don’t agree with this person,” I observed.

“I know,” he replied, “But the way she proved her point, neither will anyone else. That’s what makes her convincing.”

If someone tried to sell a car by boasting that it burned oil and its fenders were rusted, you could safely assume that the salesman didn’t have his finger on the pulse of the car-buying public.

In the same way, based on their sales pitches, it’s apparent that many school reformers are just as out of touch with parents and the “school-buying” public. The complication is that many parents and other regular people don’t know the keys to translating all the expert rhetoric. Sometimes it isn’t so easy for teachers either. This isn’t a new problem. Consider one typical essay from the “teaching and learning” vice president of a major assessment contractor that Poor Elijah clipped a while back. The author opens by stating that cheating on tests is a “serious issue.” Poor Elijah liked this because he’s heard, and still hears, education gurus maintain that borrowing answers during a test is a form of cooperation and, therefore, a step in the right social and academic direction.

He also liked her statement that “the model for testing student achievement remains a model of individual, solitary work.” That’s because Poor Elijah believes that evaluating what an individual can do on his own is the best way to evaluate what the individual in question can do on his own. Then he realized the vice president didn’t mean this as a compliment.

Yes, workers need to cooperate on the job, whether the job is building a house or sending a man to the moon. But the point of a test isn’t supposed to be finding out how well you can lean across the aisle and get the answer from somebody else. Even from a cooperative perspective, the point is supposed to be finding out how good a resource you’ll be when someone needs your knowledge and skill later on.

Unfortunately, many experts, including the testing veep, consider this position obsolete. She specifically objects to tests where “teachers tell students to stop talking with each other” and where students are expected “to refuse to assist each other.” She discounts “individual work” as our “primary focus.” She’s more concerned with the “quality of teamwork.” That’s why she wants to test students in “collaborative groups.”

When I buy a car, it makes sense to evaluate how well the collaborative Ford team works, and to compare them to the collaborative folks at Chevrolet. That’s because I’m really concerned with assessing their products, not the progress, knowledge, and skill demonstrated by individual workers.

On the other hand, it doesn’t make sense to evaluate the way a random group of students works together, especially when even the vice president acknowledges that we can’t “effectively assess the quality of teamwork.” She also concedes that it’s not uncommon for one or two team members to do all the work, while “the full group gets to bask in the credit.”

Nevertheless, she insists that we need to test cooperation because “learning has changed.” Apparently, “extensive research” has revealed that it’s better to “understand something” than to memorize an “isolated fact.”

Memo from Poor Elijah to the vice president: Unless you’re referring to extensive research conducted by Socrates, I’m not sure when you think learning “changed” to include understanding.

According to the vice president, “effective” teachers now “encourage children to exchange information.”

Memo to the vice president: This cutting edge exchange used to be called a discussion.

The vice president informs us that since the dawn of the current school reform era in the 1970s, teachers have “altered their strategies” in “fundamental ways” and thereby become more “effective.”

Memo to the veep: In 1983, one school cycle after modern reform changed our schools, A Nation at Risk said the changes were the problem. Are you sure “effective” is the word you’re looking for?

The vice president concludes her piece with a warning. Because we test individuals, it’s “small wonder” that students “attempt to affect the outcomes” by cheating. In fact, until we allow students to talk and “assist each other” during tests, we’re “inviting a culture of cheating.”

That’s right. Because I want to know what Johnny can do on his own, I’m “skewing our value system” and forcing him to cheat.

This is the kind of nonsense that circulates as wisdom in the education world. You can find it in the rationales offered for reforms in every area from curriculum to classroom discipline.

Of course, maybe Poor Elijah and I are out of touch. Maybe it makes sense to let me give my teammate’s answer on my paper so you can figure out how much I know.

Maybe this theory will catch on in the field of medicine. That way surgeons won’t really have to know how to do bypass surgery. They’ll just need to stand next to somebody who does when they’re in medical school.

Think of the possibilities – if you dare.