Tag: Learning

Here Comes the Judgment

Posted on | by Sam | 3 Comments on Here Comes the Judgment

On the fourth day of a two-week summer institute, in the haze of post-lunch hour fatigue, I watched something magical and uncomfortable transpire. And I don’t think I’ll ever see the role of the teacher the same way again.

Center for Inspired Teaching founder Aleta Margolis, the lead facilitator for the institute, brought the 28 participants to the middle of the room, with each person seated in a circle.  “We’re going to start back up with a simple group exercise,” she began. “Our goal is to bring the group closer together, sharpen our individual awareness, undertake a significant challenge together – and count as high as we can as a group.”

A few people tilted their heads inquisitively. Did she just say we’re going to do a counting game? “There’s only one rule,” Aleta continued. “When two people speak at once, we have to start over as a group. OK. Let’s begin.”

Despite several attempts, the group could climb no higher than six. Awkward laughter filled the room with each failed attempt, and more than one person shifted embarrassingly. Each time this happened, Aleta, in the same measured voice, calmly and clearly repeated the same opening line.

“Ready, one.”

Eventually, after a few more rounds of frustration, the group happened upon an innovation – people raised their hands when they were ready to say a number. The results improved, but still the group could get no higher than fifteen. Then the group ad-libbed another innovation – simply going in a circle.

In seconds, the group reached 100. Mission accomplished! Or was it? No one seemed to feel much of a sense of accomplishment. “That way is no fun,” said one woman. “There’s no challenge at all.”

Aleta asked another question of the group. “When does it enhance the experience to make something easier, and when does it enhance the experience to make something more difficult?”

A young teacher volunteered an idea. “If our goal is simply to count as high as we can, going in a circle is clearly the most efficient way. If it isn’t, however, this method inhibits our ability to achieve other goals.”

“It’s like with test scores,” added someone else. “If that’s our only goal, we can take some short cuts to raise our numbers.  But if we have other goals, it’s more complicated. We can’t only focus on one thing.”

Aleta returned the focus to the game, but not before adding a few more rules – no hand signals, and no patterns allowed. “Let’s see what happens, and let’s see what skills it takes this time.”

As the game resumed and frustration mounted, I found myself becoming more aware of how subtly but relentlessly the activities of the Inspired Teaching Institute are designed to build in the participants the skills of close and careful observation – and a form of observation that can occur without judgment. What difference did it make, after all, how high the group could count? The point was simply to see what the exercise could reveal about human behavior. And yet I watched the ways in which, for whatever reason, this simple afternoon warm up activity had provided the perfect platform for the participants to grapple with the challenge of closely observing something, and participating in it, without judgment.

“What skills are you needing to use to be successful at the game?” Aleta asked.

“Restraint.”

“Self control.”

“Focus.”

“Anticipation. “

One participant articulated a growing mood of discomfort in the room. “I don’t like this game anymore,” she shared, “because I spoke twice when someone else spoke, and I feel like I’m letting the group down.”

“What skill might it take to get yourself back in the game?” Aleta asked.

“I think you need to feel like you’re in an environment that makes it safe to take risks and make mistakes, and that’s hard to do,” said another participant.

“Let’s try playing again in a moment,” Aleta added, “but before we do I want everyone to have the following questions in mind: First, what skill does it take to get to a position of fearless participation as a learner? And second, when it comes to this game in particular, how do you know when to go?”

The game resumed, and familiar challenges returned; the group could still count no higher than 15. “Why can’t we do this?” screamed the body language of several participants, clearly frustrated with the slow pace of their progress.

Aleta, sensing the rising level of anxiety, asked everyone to take two deep audible breaths. “Now let’s consider those two questions.”

“I think the essential skill is not getting angry at yourself if you screw up,” said one woman, before another wondered aloud: “If we had simplified the game, how might that have changed the tenor of this conversation we’re having? Would it be more or less rich?”

I typed furiously, struggling to keep up with the comments and the collective effort to unlock what was leaving people feeling so frustrated. As I did, I thought how notable it was that even on the fourth day of an institute that has intentionally and steadily given a group of adults myriad opportunities to work intimately with each other and develop a trusting climate, the default emotion the game evoked was the fear of being judged for “failing”.

“I’m starting to wonder if my role as a teacher needs to be more about staying open,” opined one teacher, “so I can be more receptive to everything that happens in my classroom. It doesn’t mean there stops being right and wrong answers. But maybe it means I need to shift the way I view the pursuit of knowledge itself, and allow in my own mind for a greater possibility of interpretation. If I do this, will it help my children feel safer to be more curious and fearless about what we study?”

Aleta wrapped up the activity by writing a short statement on a piece of butcher paper: Uncomfortable v. unsafe.

“This is the most uncomfortable you’ve been since we started our work together,” she offered. “But look at how rich the conversation has been. Just remember – in this institute and in your own classrooms there’s a crucial distinction between feeling uncomfortable, which is the space where real learning occurs, and feeling unsafe, which is the space where we shut down and no learning occurs.”

It’s the Relationships, Stupid . . .

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on It’s the Relationships, Stupid . . .

I’m spending my days observing the two-week summer session of the Inspired Teaching Institute, a yearlong professional development program from Center for Inspired Teaching, a remarkable organization that prepares and supports DC teachers. The institute, described as “a 100% physical, intellectual, and emotional process through which teachers explore the art of teaching in an energetic and safe environment,” is taking place each day in the wrestling room of a DC high school in a leafy green neighborhood of Washington, DC.

The room is large and open. There are no seats, and homemade signs and placards, most of which feature memorable ideas about teaching and learning, cover the walls:

“A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.”

”It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

“To be prepared against surprise is to be trained; to be prepared for surprise is to be educated.”

“The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world – and become one’s key to the experience of others.”

Although I’ll be producing several longer pieces about Inspired Teaching and their summer Institute, I want to briefly share an activity from yesterday that sparked an essential insight into the nature of teaching and learning – and what it is we adults must prioritize in our efforts to help all children learn.

Towards the end of the day, Inspired Teaching founder Aleta Margolis, a veteran educator and former actor with an aura of presence that stems from her previous time on stage, asked the participants to brainstorm the first things they thought of in response to the following prompt: “What are the questions kids ask when they’re in school?”

A torrent of predictable answers greeted her request:

What’s that? Why are we doing this? What are we supposed to do? Can I go to the bathroom? Can I get up now? How is this going to help me in real life? Can I go with you? How much do you get paid? Do you have a boyfriend? Can I go home with you? Where are we going? How much longer? Can I have this? Do you sleep here? Can I go to the nurse? What if? Can I have some water? Can you get him to stop? Why is that teacher so mean? Is it time to go? Can we go outside? Can we have extra recess? What’s my grade? Can I do extra credit? Why’d you call my house? When is that due? Can I sit by you? Are you allowed to do that? How old are you? Is she OK? Are you getting fired? Do you love me?

Then Aleta asked a different question – “What are the questions kids ask when they’re curious and wondering about the world around them?”

Can you show me? Did you see that? Can I try? Am I doing it right? Can I take it home? What does this do? How do I stop? Will I get hurt? Will you catch me? How fast can I go? Why isn’t it working? Why is it like this? Will you be watching me? Let me do it.

After both lists were generated, Aleta led the group through a process of labeling every question on both lists into one of three categories:  P – a procedural question; N – a question relating to a personal need; or C – a question reflecting innate curiosity.

Notably, the majority of the questions received either P’s or N’s, and there were few C’s in the bunch. The disconnect between what children ask in school and what they ask when they’re curious about the world was clear. “We’re going to spend the next week and a half and throughout the school year,” said Aleta, “getting students to generate more curiosity questions, and less questions that relate to purely procedural needs.”

As the participants nodded their heads enthusiastically at the thought of the new pedagogical skill they would soon acquire, I found myself noticing something else. The overwhelming majority of the questions, regardless of which category they were in, related to personal needs, and underscored the transformative power of interpersonal relationships between teachers and students.

Will you catch me? Did you see that? Can I sit by you? Do you love me?

Some among us may want to resist this fact and stay focused squarely on instructional strategies and the bottom line of school reform – improving student test scores. I’m reminded of the controversial Charles Barkley “I am not a role model” commercial from a few years back. But just as all athletes surely are role models (whether or not they choose to fulfill the responsibility), all teachers are role models, too, and adults with a disproportionate influence on the lives and priorities of their students.

This simple truth reminded me that although our students need us to provide engaging content, clear structures and probing questions, the overriding quality they need from us is nurturance, support, and a place where they can be seen and heard. It’s about relationships – first and foremost. And strengthening the quality and quantity of relationships between adults and children in a school building should always be our primary improvement strategy.

Are National Standards a Good or a Bad Idea?

Posted on | by Sam | 6 Comments on Are National Standards a Good or a Bad Idea?

Today, a Washington Post story reported that the push for common national standards in reading and math is gaining ground. Twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia have now agreed to adopt the standards as their own.

This is notable progress when one considers how all prior efforts to promote a common set of academic standards in the United States have failed. But as the Post’s Nick Anderson reports, the Obama administration, working in concert with the National Governors Association, has been effective where others have failed by “encouraging the movement and dangling potential financial incentives for states to join.” The administration has also opted not to fund the actual work of the groups that drafted the standards, relying instead on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other private donors.

As with many other major issues, the question of standards has become a polarizing issue with starkly divided camps. On one side are advocates like Massachusetts state education commissioner Mitch Chester, who believe the proposed standards would provide “clearer signals to K-12 students about their readiness for success at the next level, including readiness for college or careers.” On the other side are folks like the Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey, who worry that the push for common standards “is opening the door to federal control. It is the most alarming centralization of power in education you can come up with.”

Who’s right?

Well, as is usually the case, I think you can quickly dismiss the folks who inhabit the extreme poles of each camp. Clearly, standards by themselves will achieve nothing but, well, a new set of standards. Just as clearly, a set of common standards need not mean the end of local control and teacher autonomy, or the arrival of full-scale standardization.

Looking around the world is instructive here. Finland, the country with the best education system in the world, has national standards (in all subjects), but it uses them to provide guidance, clarity and quality control, not to enforce a strict set of restrictions that prescribe the actions of local educators. Furthermore, standards are viewed as indicators of wisdom that students will need to be successful in college and the workplace, not shards of knowledge that make it easier to devise uniform tests and mandate standardized modes of instruction. In fact, Finland has no national exams, and student assessments are devised and implemented locally, thanks to the deep investments that country has made in its teachers.

This is a good model for how national standards should be used, says Andreas Schleicher, who heads the OECD’s Education Indicators and Analysis Division in Paris. “The question for the U.S. is not just how many charter schools it establishes,” he said, “but how to build the capacity for all schools to assume charter-like autonomy, as happens in some of the best-performing education systems.” Schleicher also points out how the U.S. relies disproportionately on “external accountability, ” or tests and consequences for poor performance, to improve schools.  By contrast, other countries do more to build their schools’ overall capacities for success, and rely on a variety of measures to gauge their progress.

Viewed in this way, national standards become helpful guideposts that contribute to a greater sense of shared clarity about what children should generally know and be able to do, not hurtful hitching posts that circumscribe local creativity, personalization, and autonomy.

Is this the path the Obama administration and the National Governors Association seek as well? I’m not sure, but I can see why some people feel nervous.  We are, after all, still a culture intent on overvaluing the illusory certainty that basic-skills test scores provide us. We still seek linear progress in the most nonlinear of professions and experiences. And we still operate in a society where powerful forces driven by the bottom line have the capacity to steer policy decisions to their liking. (Just look at the recent financial reform bill, and the last-minute changes made to it that will continue to allow banks to engage in the sorts of activities that led to the global economic crisis in the first place!)

Princeton economist Allan Blinder echoes a similar note of caution. “It is clear that the U.S. and other rich nations will have to transform their educational systems so as to produce workers for the jobs that will actually exist in their societies. Simply providing more education is probably a good thing on balance, especially if a more educated labor force is a more flexible labor force that can cope more readily with non-routine tasks and occupational change. But it is far from a panacea. In the future, how we educate our children may prove to be more important than how much we educate them.”

Done correctly, I believe a new set of national standards (in all subjects) can help us clarify both how and what we teach our children, just as it has in other countries around the world. But if the end result of this movement is little more than a new set of national exams, we will do little more than fall further behind.

How to Start a Movement, Part II

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on How to Start a Movement, Part II

Last week, I shared a video from TED about how to start a movement.

This Tuesday, my wife and I went to see the new movie Cyrus, and I watched the exact same principle unfold again. See for yourself (the clip is less than two minutes long, and it’s funny):

As with the TED video, John C. Reilly’s character demonstrates the guts of a leader by taking to the dance floor before any of his fellow party-goers were ready to join in. He could have crashed and burned — but Marisa Tomei’s character saves him, and starts to seed a movement by becoming his first follower. This gives the leader credibility — but only because he embraces her as an equal, which creates the space for others to join in as well. And then, sure enough, and shortly thereafter, a tipping point occurs and the whole energy of the party shifts.(Thank you once again, Human League.)

The scene has all the essential conditions of what defines a successful movement: a brave leader, a first follower who is embraced as an equal, and then, once the third and fourth people join in, a shift in the environmental conditions occurs that allows others to feel safe enough to join in as well. The clip is also a reminder that while it takes a leader to break the seal and roll back the rug at a house party, the first person to join in is really the one who seeds the possibility of a truly memorable evening.

In our field of public education, who, I wonder are the leaders capable of inducing first followers to start something bigger — and do so by embracing them as equals? And which first followers are most likely to bring others to a party (i.e., transformational movement in public education) that is actually FUN, assets-based and productive, and not, like so many current conversations in the field, depressing, deficit-based, and cartoonish in their simplicity?

What No One Else Will Say About Teach for America

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on What No One Else Will Say About Teach for America

There’s an interesting debate unfolding on the New York Times web site today around this question: Does Teach for America Improve the Teaching Profession?

Unfortunately, too many of the featured contributors — who have sparked hundreds of readers to offer their own feedback — chose to cast TFA in one of two terms: as either the White Knight of education reform (e.g., Donna Foote’s “A Corps of True Reformers”) or as the down-n-dirty Devil himself (e.g., Margaret Crocco’s “A Threat to Public Schools”).

As I wrote last week, in a piece titled “What Gandhi would think of The Lottery“, this sort of polarized rhetoric is the latest iteration of the “I/It” way of seeing public education, and it will get us nowhere. So as someone who neither loves nor hates TFA, let me offer a succinct summary of how I see them, since no one seems to want to acknowledge the fuller picture of what they represent:

First, the good news: TFA is closer to a key recipe for systems improvement than any other entity in either the traditional or alternative teacher certification route — they have figured out how to make their program among the most highly competitive in the country. As the Times reported earlier in the week, 18% of Yale’s most recent crop of seniors applied to TFA — nearly one out of every five graduates — and 46,359 candidates across the country applied for just 4,500 spots.

It may seem odd to praise TFA via the research of Linda Darling-Hammond, but LDH’s most recent book, The Flat World and Education, cites as a key component of the Finnish success story its ability to raise the competitiveness of its teacher preparation programs (which now accept only ~15% of those who apply). So we should all celebrate — and learn from — TFA’s ability to attract so many bright and passionate young people to a profession that still scores low on the prestige scale.

Now, the bad news: One thing TFA does NOT do that has also been essential to Finland’s success is invest deeply in preparing teachers for a research-based professional career. Finland’s teachers don’t drink from a fire hose and then inherit a classroom of high-needs children — their preparation includes both extensive (and excellent) coursework on how to teach, and a full year of clinical experience in a school associated with their university of study.

This is not a foreign concept in the United States — it’s called medical school. Or law school (with its summer internships). Or just about any other graduate degree that’s designed to prepare people for a top profession. Which gets us to the crux of the problem with TFA — on the whole it takes us further from, not closer to, the establishment of teaching as a truly prestigious profession, rather than merely a noble way to gain valuable experience as an individual on the evolving path of twenty-something life. We would never tolerate Doctors for America in our most overused emergency rooms. We would never send Architects for America to Haiti to experiment on earthquake-resistant housing design. Why then do we not only embrace the concept of placing our smartest and least experienced teachers before our neediest children, but go even further and suggest that the TFA model is actually what all teacher preparation should look like?

To be fair, part of the void that was filled by TFA existed because so many of our graduate education programs are, well, sucky. And until they change and get better, we can’t begin to aspire to the sorts of transformations other countries have been able to bring about.

If we really value learning and teaching, as Finland and other countries do, we need to invest deeply in the creation of a true long-term teaching profession, and not just a short-term teaching force. That means both traditional and alternative certification programs need to raise their game. And while TFA has much to teach the field about attracting the best and the brightest to our nation’s classrooms, until it revises its preparation model it will unintentionally perpetuate the illusion that reforming our education system simply means smarter, younger teachers. It’s just not that simple. And we can do better.

The Inspired Mindset — Starting a School, Part III

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This morning, over orange juice, coffee and red grapes in the theater room of the Capital City Public Charter School, a small group of interested educators, scholars and citizens listened as Center for Inspired Teaching’s Director of Teaching and Learning, Julie Sweetland, explained what makes the Center’s work so powerful.

Inspired Teaching is the entity most responsible for the new charter school (scheduled opening Fall 2011) for which I currently serve as Board Chair. And the event allowed Sweetland, an articulate and charismatic spokesperson, to clarify what distinguishes her organization from other alternative certification programs in the city, and nationwide. “Over the past 15 years,” she explained, “our work with thousands of educators has helped us learn more about what it takes to be an inspired teacher. That works begins with our search for people with an inspired mindset — we want builders, and people who are excited by confronting new challenges in their work, not blockers, or people who would rather do what they’ve always done.”

Sweetland went on to define the three central tensions Inspired Teaching wants its teachers, and staff, to be aware of. “The first is balancing the tension between radical creativity and structured execution,” she said. “The second is balancing the need to be both nurturing and impact-driven. And the third is maintaining an approach that allows for both decentralization and integration.”

One of the participants asked her to elaborate. “We believe that a healthy learning environment must have all of the following: Autonomy (for both the teachers and, occasionally, the students as well); Belonging; Connectedness; Developmentally-appropriate activities; and Engaging learning opportunities. And all of our work is geared towards helping teachers do each of those things at the highest level.”

I urge all of you to learn more about Center for Inspired Teaching. Check out their web site, and let me know what you think of their philosophy. Our hope is that, beginning in 2011, the Inspired Teaching School can begin serving as a catalytic force of change in the city, and spur other schools to invest in the capacity of teachers to keep placing a high priority on student achievement and mastery of challenging material — and stop doing so at the expense of sharpening students’ creativity and intellectual curiosity.

The Testing Carousel Goes Round and Round . . .

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on The Testing Carousel Goes Round and Round . . .

Today’s Washington Post reports that the test scores of elementary school kids slipped this year after two successive years of growth, “a setback to Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee as she seeks to overhaul the city’s schools.”

No doubt, this news is being used by Rhee’s critics to point out that her particular brand of reform can’t bring the city the lasting change in its public schools that everyone desires. Meanwhile, Rhee responded to the news with equanimity. “We like to celebrate when we do well, and when we don’t, we have to take responsibility,” she said. “We have to own this and figure out how to move forward.”

Can I please make a wish to the education fairy and ask that this be the last of this sort of story I ever see? For those of us who believe that the best way to assess a school’s overall health involves a balanced scorecard of assessments, we can’t have it both ways — you can’t criticize Rhee for focusing on tests, and then lambaste her when those same scores are poor. It either is or isn’t a viable way to assess the health of a school.

In that same spirit, why aren’t folks like Rhee proactively diffusing these sorts of stories by getting out in front of the curve and releasing their own bundle of assessment measures, as a way to diffuse the potential power of the test scores when viewed in isolation? Rhee could do this immediately, without even getting into the contentious issue of using performance assessments. The city could stitch together an interim scorecard, made up entirely of existing measures (student and faculty absenteeism rates, student disciplinary data, graduation rates, a balanced set of course offerings, school climate surveys, and yes, test scores) and use it to educate the public about the many elements that go into a high-quality learning environment? Depending on what the data tell us, it might even lead to some insights that could drive future policy proposals. So let’s stop bickering over the wrong thing — otherwise, we’ll be stuck interminably on this basic-skills testing carousel, and forced to watch it go round and round while other countries are actively revising their education systems to become more effective at imparting higher-order skills and preparing children for the 21st century.

We can do better.

Data-Driven Decision Making . . . and Soccer?

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on Data-Driven Decision Making . . . and Soccer?

Great timing.

A week after I wrote about what the World Cup can teach us about school reform, the New York Times published an article about the growing push for more detailed data in the relatively data-free world of professional soccer.

I am not, for what it’s worth, against the use of more sophisticated data in making decisions about how to improve the learning conditions for kids (or, for that matter, how to make better decisions on the soccer pitch). Who would be? In fact, I’ve written in the past about how a balanced scorecard in schools would help educators do their jobs more effectively.

That being said, I am very much against the glorification of data as a way to make extremely subjective, non-linear things — like learning how to use one’s mind well, or watching a collective burst of creativity and synchronicity that leads to a beautiful soccer goooooooaaaaaaal — into extremely objective, linear things for which we can appropriately plan and script out a desired, predictable response.

I don’t think it’s coincidental that this new push for soccer data is reported the same week as an announcement in my home city that Chancellor Michelle Rhee intends to significantly expand the use of standardized tests so that “every D.C. student from kindergarten through high school is regularly assessed to measure academic progress and the effectiveness of teachers.” What’s afoot in both instances is, on one hand, the (appropriate) desire to take human ingenuity and apply it to situations that in the past have lacked specificity, and, on the other, the (inappropriate) effort to make everything quantifiable, resulting in an overreliance on that which can be measured — at the expense of everything else.

Notably, the push for soccer data seems far more measured than what I see in education. According to Mark Brunkhart, the president of a company that provides soccer data for a fee to clubs and news organizations, he and his staff do not blindly evangelize statistics. Every month or two, he says, he gets a call from a professor or graduate student who is a rabid soccer fan and just finished Moneyball, the book that brought sabermetrics into the mainstream in 2003. (I wrote about Moneyball and its potentially positive implications for school reform in a 2009 column titled “What Would Theo Do?”)

“Every single one comes with the idea that they’re going to solve soccer with the ‘Moneyball’ approach,” Brunkhart said, “and I try to talk them all down.” Similarly, the president of the Society for American Baseball Research pointed to Miroslav Klose’s second goal in Germany’s 4-0 victory against Argentina in the World Cup quarterfinals as an example of how statistics seem to overlook the nuance and elegance of soccer. “A series of three or four absolutely beautiful passes — how do you capture that?” he said. “It’s just the nature of the game.”

Would that I were seeing similar restraint among our education leaders. As longtime educator Ted Sizer once said, “Inspiration, hunger: these are the qualities that drive good schools. The best we educational planners can do is to create the most likely conditions for them to flourish, and then get out of their way.”

Education Innovation in the Slums of Rio

Posted on | by Sam

Charles Leadbeater, a researcher at the UK firm Demos, spoke recently at TED about his search for radical new forms of education. What he found was remarkable innovation in the slums of Rio and Kibera, where some of the world’s poorest kids are finding transformative new ways to learn.

Among Leadbeater’s chief insights? Focus on asking questions, not providing answers; start developing strategies that pull children into learning, and stop pushing them into a single curriculum; and take a cue from Chinese restaurants, not McDonald’s, by finding models that spread, not scale.

Watch the video yourself and see what you think.

More Tests on the Way in DC?

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on More Tests on the Way in DC?

In yesterday’s Washington Post, reporter Bill Turque wrote that Michelle Rhee is seeking an outside contractor to help dramatically expand DCPS’ use of standardized tests, so that every grade from K through 12 will have some form of assessment to measure student progress and teacher effectiveness.

Is this what happens when we pray too long at the altar of “data-driven decision making?”

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for what that concept actually means — using information to guide all decisions about how to help children learn more effectively — but the faulty logic here is that adding more standardized tests at the end of every school year will achieve that worthy goal. Wouldn’t it be better to start exploring how to strategically bundle other existing measures that tell us a lot about a school’s overall health (such as attendance, graduation rates, faculty absenteeism, and, yes, attitudinal surveys of the students themselves)? Wouldn’t it be better to start experimenting with ways to have other schools in the District implement student portfolio assessments as effectively as the good people at Thurgood Marshall Academy — recently profiled on CBS News — have done?And wouldn’t it be better to stop pretending that systemic reform, and the impact those changes will have on individual students, can be as easily monitored and measured as these tests suggest?

Bring on the information revolution, I say — and this ain’t it.