The Mismeasure of Teaching and Learning: How Contemporary School Reform Fails the Test

Abstract

Though I am disheartened by how few reformers express a robust vision of public education, there is no doubt that they are committed to education itself, and particularly for those who have not been well-served by our schools. But to get the kind of teaching we saw in the opening vignettes, to make more of our schools the potent democratic institutions they can and should be, the reform movement will have to generate within itself a much richer sense of teaching and learning. We have a strong belief in our country that to find a measure for something is to understand it; we confuse counting with analysis. Education reform needs a conceptual framework that certainly would include testing and technique, but embedded in the cognitive and emotional world of the classroom.