Michelle Rhee, John Holt, and Tests

Since I am always intrigued by issues of education (I don’t know why, as I always hated school and everything about it . . . Maybe I am doing this as therapy), I repeatedly come across news items about Michelle Rhee.

If you don’t know who this person is, she was once appointed chancellor of the DC public schools and raised quite a ruckus, firing lots of teachers and offering bonuses for teachers whose students produced higher test scores. There was a bit of an issue when the accusation was made that some teachers were doctoring the test papers in order to raise scores and hence their bonuses . . .  PBS did a whole documentary about her . . .  anyway, long story short, she resigned (see corrective comment below) from that gig and now she is out talking about better education.

Funny thing, when I looked her up on Wikipedia I discovered that Ms. Rhee and I attended the same high school, Maumee Valley Country Day School.

Given that much of the ruckus in DC had to do with test scores, this got my attention. Bear in mind, she is a bit of a hot-button-issue-lightning-rod these days, but I have no feelings about her pro or con.  I have no doubt but that she is very well-intentioned, and, being an MV graduate, I’m sure she is a very nice person.  But she also happens to be an obvious example of the millions of people who think tests are a good thing.  I happen to be one of those people who think tests are a bad thing.  Many people in the academic industrial complex live in a world where tests are worshiped as a universal good.  The purpose of this blog post is simply to question that broadly held dogma.

My opinion is not born of any past test-failure bitterness; on the contrary, I was always a star “test taker.”  But even though I supposedly benefited from academic testing, I was always terribly conscious of the general harm it caused.  I did a chapter on the problems with tests in my book “Principles of Applied Stupidity” . . . But I didn’t come close to articulating them as well as John Holt did in this essay, titled “The Tyranny of Testing.” This, and several of his other most interesting essays on education, are readable online in a google books venue.

John Holt was an extraordinary visionary, I appreciate his work now more than ever.

(Note if you click your mouse and hold it you can more easily control and slide the pages, I find that is easier that using the scroll bar on right.)

In closing, there is an old saying: “To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the eternal popularity of dogs.”

So here is my corollary: “The giving of tests gives power to the test giver; hence the eternal popularity of tests.”

–jl