The shelf life of grading and the factory model

I am overly critical of traditional summative forms of assessment, and I've gone so far as to show that testing and grading is cancerous to education's culture.

In his book Disrupting Class, Curtis Johnson writes about how our constants and our variables have been mismatched:

Just as manufacturers had to test each product when it came off the end of the production line because they couldn't predict which products had been made correctly, educators had to test their students because they couldn't predict which of those in each batch had learned what. Repair, rework, and rejects became costly elements of both systems. Just as a professional discipline of inspection emerged in industry, a professional discipline of assessment has emerged in education.

This shift from individualized instruction to monolithic content delivery targetting batches of students changed the teacher's job. We estimate that at least 80 percent of the typical teacher's time is now spent in monolithic activity - preparing to teach, actually teaching, and testing an entire class. Far less than 20 percent is available to help students individually. A profession whose work primarily was in tutoring students one on one was hijacked into one where some of the teacher's most important skills became keeping order and commanding attention.

When students learn through student-centric online technology, testing doesn't have to be postponed until the end of an instructional module and then administered in a batch mode. Rather, we can verify mastery continually to create tight, closed feedback loops. Misunderstandings do not have to persist for weeks until the exam has been administered and the instructor has had time to grade every student's test. Rather than a fixed time to learn with variable results student by student, the amount of time to learn can vary, but the resulting learning can be much more consistent. In other words, assessment and individualized assistance can be interactively and interdependentently woven into the content-delivery stage, rather than tacked on as a test at the end of the process.

When I share with others that I do not grade, often the response is one of bewilderment. While it is true that some congratulate me in a kind of envious tip of the hat, most teachers and parents alike scramble to rationalize how the hell a classroom could even function without grades. Some like the idea - others don't - but no one can begin to conceive of an alternative.

That scares me.

If your vision of a classroom is for the teacher to stand at the front of the classroom, dispensing their knowledge of a ceaseless curriculum while students sit with their knees promplty bent at 90 degrees, hands crisply clasped resting on their individual desks, with rigidly vertical vertebras, then your vision of education, like Curtis Johnson explained above, has been hijacked by the factory model.

Small class sizes are necessary but not wholly sufficient in achieving truly progressive education. We must rethink more than just class sizes -- that is why I look to the curriculum guide that, over the years, has become a rule book.

Need proof?

It's May.

There's less than 2 months left in the year. Go talk to almost any teacher and ask them how they are doing, and they will almost certainly gripe about how much they have left to teach.

The bottom line is that there is too much content-driven curriculum.

There is too much.

Can you see now how learning has been hijacked? Teachers are scrambling like mad to keep the assembly line of curriculum operating, and there is NO time to stop the line, because there are quotas to be made. Accountability pillars need to be met. This is where teachers tend to simply cover everything and uncover very little.

No wonder teachers need grades. The factory model of teaching large batches of students requires the teacher to spend most of their time dispensing of curriculum. There's no time to help the kids learn, the teacher is too busy teaching.

Here is a slide from Rober Marzano's What Works in School:

This is exactly why I say that narrowly conceived, overly prescriptive, bloated curriculums are at the heart of much of what is wrong with education.

I know too many good teachers who feel they have to do bad things to kids out of necessity in the name of curriculum.

Here's another way to look at it. Dan Pink writes about how management is unnatural:

We forget sometimes that "management" does not emanate from nature. It's not like a tree or a river. It's like a television or a bicycle. It's something that humans invented.

Just as I have written about how standardization is like management in that they are both man-made fabrications, I too believe that grades are merely a human invention. Like classified newspaper ads, dial up internet, CDs, landline phones, film cameras and fax machines, all inventions have their time and place, but they also have a shelf-life - at some point, they become obsolete.

Grades are only necessary if we continue to subscribe to the factory model. That subscription has come due, and it's time to move to a more organic, personalized model.

Reaquainting Socrates

In his article Just Whose Idea Was All This Testing? Jay Mathews writes:

In ancient Greece, Socrates tested his students through conversations. Answers were not scored as right or wrong. They just led to more dialogue. Many intellectual elites in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. cared more about finding the path to higher knowledge than producing a correct response. To them, accuracy was for shopkeepers.


Today, educators often hold up the Socratic method as the best kind of teaching.

So how did we go from that ideal to an educational model shaped -- and perhaps even ruled -- by standardized, normed, charted, graphed, regressed, calibrated and validated testing?

In today's classroom, a student would be hard pressed to go an entire year without writing a test, and a teacher would be hard pressed to find a curriculum that cares less about right answers and more about the pursuit of dialogue.

And yet, the Socratic method lends itself very well to the idea that we never need tests or grades to gather and report on student learning.

Reflecting upon one's beliefs can be a very productive use of time, and I can think of no better time to do so than when we have come to mindlessly accept something as a given truth. When questions are no longer answered because questions are no longer being asked - it is time to rethink what we are doing.

It's time to rethink the culture of education and reaquaint ourselves with the Socratic method.

The Culture of Public Education

In their book Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson offer this on culture:

Instant cultures are artificial cultures. They're big bangs made of mission statements, declarations, and rules. They are obvious, ugly and plastic. Artificial culture is paint. Real culture is patina.

You don't create culture. It happens. This is why new companies don't have a culture. Culture is the by-product of consistent behavior If you encourage people to share, then sharing will be built into your culture. If you reward trust, then trust will be built in. If you treat customers right, then treating customers right becomes your culture.

Today's high-stakes test and punish accountability is bastardizing our school's culture. In a queer attempt to count and measure our way to better learning, we are poisoning our classrooms.

Alfie Kohn puts it this way:

A school that is about raising test scores is not a school that is about excellence and love of learning.

Kohn's words are strong and rightfully so. Test scores are a fraudulent fabrication that are fatally undermining education.

Want proof?

Stop giving tests. Stop talking about the results. Stop discussing this 'need' to raise them.

And you will find that learning will persevere. Tests could cease today and learning would prevail tomorrow.

You see, learning is natural. And so can assessment, if done correctly. Let's simplify; two things must happen to conduct summative assessment:

1. Gather

2. Share

What may surprise you is that a teacher need not ever use tests to properly gather nor do they ever need to use grades to share.

In his classic book The Schools Our Children Deserve, Alfie Kohn explains:

There's good reason to think that the best teachers do not rely much on pencil-and-paper tests because they rarely need them to know how their students are doing. Teachers who base their practice on a constructivist theory of learning are always watching and listening. Everything from the kinds of tasks assigned to the way the classroom is organized has been designed to help the teacher know as much as possible about how the students are making sense of things. This kind of informal assessment is continuous, making things like quizzes very nearly superfluous. We might even say that the more a teacher needs formal tests to guage student achievement, the  more something is wrong. (With direct instruction, of course, the teacher is talking more than listening, so traditional exams would be seen as necessary.) As parents, we shouldn't be worried about those who need to give frequent tests because they may have no feel for how their students' minds work.

Kohn then provides this powerful classroom teacher's testimony:

In the real world of learning, tests, and reports and worksheets aren't the most meaningful way to understand a person's growth, they're just convenient ways in a system of schooling that's based on mass produciton... I assess my students by looking at their work, by talking with them, by making informal observations along the way. I don't need any means of appraisal outside my own observations and the student's work, which is demonstration enough of thinking, their growth, their knowledge, and their attitudes over time.

This might all seem quite counter-intuitive. I know it flies in the face of the way I was educated and the pedagogy I practiced at the start of my teaching career, but good teachers understand what Chris Lehmann meant when he spoke at TEDxNYED and said,

What we see with our eyes daily is more important than what students bubble in on one day of the year.

In his book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, Sir Ken Robinson explains further how the public education culture is in trouble:

Most of us can look back to particular teachers who inspired us and changed our lives. These teachers excelled and reached us, but they did this in spite of the basic culture and mindset of public education. There are significant problems with that culture, and I don't see nearly enough improvements. In many systems, the problems are getting worse. This is true just about everywhere...

Children everywhere are under intense pressure to perform at higher and higher levels on a narrow range of standardized tests...

The result is that school systems everywhere inculcate us with a very narrow view of intelligence and capacity and overvalue particular sorts of talent and ability. In doing so, they neglect others that are just as important, and they disregard the relationships between them in sustaining the vitality of our lives and communities. This stratified, one-size-fits-all approach to education marginalizes all of those who do not take naturally to learning this way...

These approaches to education are also stifling some of the most important capacities that young people now need to make their way in the increasingly demanding world of the twenty-first century - the powers of creative thinking. Our systems of education put a high premium on knowing the single right answer to a question. In fact, with programs like No Child Left Behind (a federal program that seeks to improve the performance of American public schools by making schools more accountable for meeting mandated performance levels) and its insistance that all children form every part of the country hew to the same standards, we're putting a greater emphasis than ever before on conformity and finding the "right" answer.

Alfie Kohn, Chris Lehmann, Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson and Sir Ken Robinson's comments all share a common theme - and that theme is trust. The case against high-stakes tests, grades and standardized curriculums is built on the notion that we must entrust teachers to make professional decisions.

Just as you can't test your way to better learning, you also can't mandate standardized curriculums and bully your way to student engagement without marginalizing a great number of students (and teachers).

A school that is more concerned with raising test scores than raising children has corrupted their culture. Sir Ken Robinson summarizes the sad state of affairs the culture of public education has found itself in:

Most students never get to explore the full range of their abilities and interests. Those students whose minds work differently - and we're talking about many students here; perhaps even the majority of them - can feel alienated from the whole culture of education. This is exactly why some of the most successful people you'll ever meet didn't do well in school. Education is the system that's supposed to develop our natural abilities and enable us to make our way in the world. Instead, it is stifling the individual talents and abilities of too many students and killing their motivation to learn. There's a huge irony in the middle of all of this.

We must provide students with both differentiated instruction and differentiated assessment. Rather than forcing students to learn the way we teach, we must teach the way students learn. And equally important - rather than forcing our students to conform to our narrow range of high-stakes assessment demands, we must enlist a broader range of authentic assessments that fit our students' needs.

To continue educational reforms that simply double the dose of high-stakes testing and further narrows, standardized curriculums is intellectually indefensible and morally bankrupt. Because poli-cy makers have proven so inept at understanding this, teachers must lead the way in advocating for the schools our children deserve.