Erica Jacobs: Educational trends

Aren't you tired of the "ten best" or "ten worst" lists of the decade? You didn't see those columns in the education section. The reason there are no best or worst educational trends is that nearly all educational trends are bad, and we all know it.

There are, of course, educational changes in specific schools and districts that can have good or bad results. Increasing class size, for instance, is always a bad idea, yet one that every local jurisdiction is planning to implement (yet again) as a cost-cutting measure for next year.

And there are good ideas, too: computers for students and teachers, good books for all classes, fair compensation for teachers, occasional field trips for students and late start times for high schools. (I can dream, can't I?)

But educational trends are another matter. The U.S. Department of Education recently sent around a media advisory that shows what I mean: "Today, the U.S. Department of Education announced that it will hold a second round of public input meetings to be held in the Washington, D.C. metro area to listen to and learn from assessment experts and practitioners." I won't subject this phrasing to the scrutiny George Orwell or Strunk and White would give it; I might be accused of quibbling, and I have much bigger objections.

What makes anyone think that "experts and practitioners" in education departments understand how to use assessments? The tests I've seen produced by such experts for No Child Left Behind are unimaginative and don't require the kind of complexity of thought and reasoning our children need to succeed in college and life.

And even if we develop tests that require high-level critical thinking, how will the results be measured? The current "trend" is to apply rubrics to writing and thinking -- and I know from 23 years of grading Advanced Placement Literature tests that a rubric means almost nothing without accompanying examples of what is meant by terms such as "sophisticated" writing and thinking, or "simplistic expression."

It may be trendy to adopt rubrics that have a scale requiring the best papers to be "well-written" and "demonstrating control over the elements of composition," but no teacher or student will understand what that means without extensive use of samples. Ask the Chief Readers in charge of Advanced Placement tests in the humanities, and they will tell you that the most important part of the grading process is the sample selection. What you choose to illustrate terms in the rubric will change outcomes dramatically.

So as experts convene to give their "input" on assessments and the use of rubrics to reach particular standards, the heart of the assessment process is nowhere to be found: how to choose examples to illustrate what these tests are looking for. When the answers are multiple-choice, this is irrelevant -- which is why we have so many mindless assessments that measure how well a child memorizes. But that's not education.

Education is about generous-spirited teachers whose classrooms enlighten the subjects and students they love. The U.S. Department of Education should try focusing on that. How do we increase the number of those teachers? That would be a "trend" I'd heartily endorse.