Beyond Measure REVIEW
“I wanted to really change these kids lives, and get them to see learning as a lifetime skill, said Emma Bowman who taught English in a low income community in Oakland. But it's gotten harder and harder to feel like I could teach the things I believe in ... things that actually get our students to think, and work together and care, are pushed aside."
Beyond Measure is about how contemporary public education systems are grinding out the humanity of children. She begins with her family’s personal history and with educational philosophy and policy and moves on to the impact that those things eventually have on children’s health and wellness. She has a chapter on homework stress, on time stress, on testing stress, on college admissions preparation stress, and one what people are doing to combat the pressure of regulatory educational control in the contemporary scool.
It is a tough book to read if you have been working against the system within the system for a portion of you life. IT probably confirms you in your decision to homeschool if that is what you decided to do (though that option can come with its own stressors). The author was the originator of the film Race to Nowhere and spices her book with comments that she heard in watching her movie screened in communities all over America. “A father at a screening in Hinsdale, Illinois, she writes,
“stood up and said he felt like a failure as a parent for not giving his teenage son and daughter a different sense of accountability – an afterschool job instead of a couple of those advanced classes, time together as a family instead of time glued to homework on the computer. They need to have a broader experience of life, which is: it isn't all about studying, he exclaimed. Getting an A in the class does not equal success in life. It just doesn't."
“Aaron, a high school junior, actress, and writer in California, knows just how confining schools narrow definition of smarts can be. “Art is my release, my hallelujah, my break,’ she says. ‘But in schools, art is the first thing to go. There is a specific thing the school wants you to shine in, and if you don't shine in it, then you don't shine at all. I feel like they are trying to make us into one person.’”
She includes interviews with scores of people who have exites the system. “While explaining what drove him to exit the public school system and start a charter school, Rosenstock recalled the moment working in Cambridge, Massachusetts;
“We had a schedule that really was designed for adult convenience, not for students convenience. It made no sense to a lot of us. So, I met with 16 teachers. I said, we need to change the schedule, and they all sat there very somberly and one of them said, well, we can't change the schedule. The schedule won't let us, as if it were sitting at the table. And it took me six years to realize that that person was right. The schedule wouldn't let us.”
She argues that an excessive amount of homework can easily unbalance a kid’s life and can compel them to trade in happiness for the promise of some elusive happiness granting “success” some day. I suspect that there are people living today who can look back at their lives and say “I wish I had done more homework,” but she suspects that the opposite occurs more frequently. She suspects that there are far more people who look back and say “I wish I had closer relationships with my family” or “I wish I had more memories of adventure” or “I wish I had spent more time caring for the needs of others than getting high grades on homework assignments.”
“When researchers asked students to rank what was most important to them – achieving at a high-level, happiness (feeling good most of the time), or caring for others – almost 50% picked high achievement as their top choice. 30% chose happiness, and about 20% chose caring for others.”
“We give them this very specialized, strange thing,” Abeles says of many forms of contemporary “Zombie Nation” education, “which is: we teach them how to go to school.”
“It's not about codling or helicoptering or making excuses. Rather, it's about elevating the essentials. It's about questioning our spoonfed definition of success and remembering what we truly want for our children: wellness, independence, purpose, and the spark of excitement in their eyes. It's about recognizing that it doesn't matter what college an unhealthy, insecure teen gets into – not if she's too stressed to learn or too anxious to grow. And it's about reclaiming for children and families the precious time that's rightfully theirs.”
She believes that the creators of the system meant well and does not waste time demonizing whatever political party that she blames for the present system. Mostly, she is addressing unintended consequences. “I don't believe that the authors of the no Child Left Behind law in 2001 understood the monster they were creating,” she writes,
“They saw a society in which massive gaps in education and acheivment persisted between rich and poor, and between whites and Asians on the one side and other minority groups on the other. They wanted to insist that our education system attend to those inequities - an important and laudable goal.”
I have recently been taking a course in literacy education and the first third of the class has been on assessment, largely because that is what a lot of literacy teachers today do a lot of the time. Abeles has a lot to say about education, asserting, to use my own metaphor, that we pay for two people to dig the cabbage up to see how well it is growing for every one farmer we pay to water it. She calls the present culture “test worship.”
“To the first point, test worship is squeezing the life out of our children's learning, both in what schools teach and how they teach it. Within the first few years of no Child left behind, school scrambling to boost math and reading scores on the annual test started cutting back on all kinds of other classes.”
“Most tests used to evaluate students, teachers, and school districts predict almost nothing except the likelihood of achieving similar scores on subsequent test.”
“Daniel Koritz, the Harvard psychometrician and author of Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us, explains that for tests to serve a useful purpose in education, they have to honor a fundamental principle: ‘don't treat her score on the test as a synonym for what she has learned.’
We tend, as British educator and author Ken Robinson says, “to confuse academic ability with intelligence.”
“Whatever we do repeatedly is how we wire ourselves neurologically,” explains Mariale Hardiman, director of the narrow education initiative at Johns Hopkins University. This book provides a wealth of evidence that we are wiring our kids for something less than the good life when we disconnect them from real challenges, the actual care of others, and the forging of strong relationships and those are all the things that we seem to accomplish when we load homework on them, test the hell out of them, and through them into the gristmill of college admissions processes.
Question for Comment: What do your kids learn these days that it likely to have the most returns in their long term happiness?
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