Backwards into the Future — Again

Abstract

recent report on American students by the Brown Center on Education Policy is part of an assault on progressive education that attempts to misdirect our attention from what really matters in schools, Mr. Phillips argues. ********** OVER THE past few years, there has been a more or less continual assault on progressive education. Within the policy sphere, education has been dominated by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act and its closely related state-level mandates. focus has been on standards, test scores, and accountability. Within the education establishment, a number of supposedly authoritative, but critically flawed, research reports appeared that used test results as cover for thinly veiled attacks on progressive approaches. most recent and insidious of these reports was brought to my attention by a headline in my local newspaper that read, of Students Appears to Be Overrated. story highlighted a recent study, How Well Are American Students Learning? by the Brookings Institution's Brown Center on Education Policy. While this is a major and respectable education think tank, the report it issued is an embarrassment. One major section of the report, The Happiness Factor in Student Learning, deserves particular attention. report describes contemporary progressives (using Bill Gates as the primary example!) as mistakenly abandoning book learning, subject-matter knowledge, and learning for learning's sake in favor of activity-based learning, learning how to learn, and learning for self-awareness and personal growth. Gates' praise for a project-focused, allegedly book and no lecture school is cited as the prime evidence. Having created this straw man, How Well Are Our Students Learning? does its best to demolish it. report totally disregards the fact that good contemporary progressive educators make extensive use of the written word, are well steeped in subject-matter knowledge, and integrate project-based learning, small-group instruction, and brief lectures in highly effective ways. report is focused on international comparisons and shows that countries that rank lower in student happiness, confidence, and subject-matter relevance do better on the international math tests. Including student happiness as a major variable and using it as the eye-catching headline of a major section of the report suggests that the researchers were either extraordinarily limited in their thinking or purposefully manipulative. Measuring happiness through any single instrument or process is impossible; sophisticated researchers of this variable are just beginning to tease out all the complexities. But when we look closer at the Brown data, we find that the researchers never measured happiness at all. They measured enjoyment of mathematics, which is not the equivalent of student happiness. use of the term happiness throughout the study is, at best, foolish and, at worst, misleading. Equally troublesome, the measure of enjoyment used is a response to a single item: I enjoy mathematics. Apart from these extraordinarily flawed measurement devices, there is far more wrong with the assertion that student happiness doesn't matter and its implications. Of course student enjoyment is no guarantee of learning, and mistaken confidence can be counterproductive. This is now conventional wisdom that is shared by most educators, including progressive educators. But the study provides no insight into what does effectively enhance learning. Equally important, its use of cross-cultural data is flawed and misleading. Let's take Japan as one example. It's one of the primary countries cited for its high test scores in math and its low scores for student confidence and enjoyment of math. What a great example! In his highly praised new book, Shutting Out the Sun, Michael Zielenziger describes a generation of hundreds of thousands of young Japanese who have retreated into their bedroom and refused to come out. …