Why Standardized Tests Are Failing Students, Society
The anniversary of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings are a reminder not only of one of the great moral challenges in the world, but of the damage done to students by abandoning moral education.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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Today marks the 80th anniversary of America’s dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The first was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
This action has raised moral questions that have shaped U.S. and international policy about arms buildups ever since.
What will be expected of Virginia’s 11th grade students beginning this year in their U.S. History class when the topic is raised?
“The student will apply history and social science skills to analyze the United States’ involvement in World War II by … explaining U.S. military intelligence and technology, including island hopping, the Manhattan Project, and the bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
There is nothing inherently incorrect about what teachers are being expected to impart here. Nor is it improper to expect students to be able to answer some basic factual questions about these events.
What is a problem is the standard’s boiling down an event that has defined America in the post-World War II era to objective bullet points about intelligence and technology. This is not history. It’s a delusion we sell to parents, students, administrators, bureaucrats, and edu-crats that can be quantified and packaged.
History, taught properly, is far more challenging and significant to a person’s development.
By the time students reach the 11th grade, they should be able to wrestle with difficult moral questions, such as whether the United States should have dropped the atomic bomb.
There is no clear-cut answer to this question, and the American Experience documentary Victory in the Pacific does an excellent job making that point by demonstrating the moral calculus U.S. and Japanese leaders wrestled with in the closing days of World War II that ultimately led to these two fateful events.
So why not raise the bar and expect students to wrestle with the challenging repercussions of the bombings since World War II, and likewise struggle with the difficult challenges it created for those who made the decisions, and those few who actually survived the blasts that collectively were responsible for 400,000 deaths?
We know why.
First, to effectively test this means having students write open-ended essay questions that explore the nuances of this story and the challenges it has created for U.S. policy ever since. As U.S. History is a required class to graduate, Virginia would have to develop a system for grading all these essay questions. (And no, AI is not a solution to grading these.) Simply put, there is neither political will nor money to make that happen.
Second, as we saw with the rise of the “parents’ rights” movement, we as a society put too little value on self-reflection and wrestling with the consequences of what those who came before gifted us. If we can’t talk honestly about slavery and its impact on America then and now, it’s unlikely that parents will entertain a broad-based discussion about the moral implications of atomic weapons.
Socrates Had It Right All Along
Since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001, the U.S. has ceded education to those process-minded politicians and edu-crats who insist on quantifying with data precisely what children are learning.
It’s not that there’s no room in academia for objective testing. There is much, especially at the lower grade levels, that can be easily measured with more-rote exams. (Nota bene — SOLs are a poor tool for measuring reading comprehension, which is why the Virginia Literary Act, with its emphasis on the “science of reading,” may improve children’s ability to decode words but is unlikely to improve their ability to understand what they’re reading.)
But our insistence that all education be reduced to that which can be measured with data is forcing schools to reduce challenging material to rote memorization that does not stimulate intellectual development, or “critical thinking” — a process that is oft-discussed but poorly understood.
Wrestling with the morality of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings gets to the heart of critical thinking.
The Oxford English Dictionary describes critical thinking as “the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment.”
The wording here is important. “Objective analysis and evaluation” are related to being able to handle primary and secondary sources, as well as the strengths and weaknesses that each brings to helping us understand something. “Form a judgment” is not simply spouting an opinion. It’s balancing analysis with a logical argument in support of a position.
Judgments — like opinions — are not all created equal. One’s ability to articulate an argument, or judgment, is a far better measure of how well students are being educated than simply testing bare-bone facts.
Neither standardized testing, nor Artificial Intelligence, is going to promote and nurture that kind of development.
This type of critical thinking is developed principally by human dialog led by someone not only knowledgeable about the topic at hand, but skilled in helping students understand the flaws in their own thinking. This type of teaching — known as the Socratic method — has fallen out of favor as standardized testing has pushed teachers to force-feed facts in a rapid-fire way in order to “cover” mandated material.
Hibakusha
Why does this matter?
Ask the hibakusha, or survivors of the atomic blasts, whose numbers are quickly diminishing.
In a piece for the New York Times on Wednesday, Terumi Tanaka makes the case for a richer understanding of events like Hiroshima.
With the number of hibakusha shrinking, there are fewer survivors to provide first-hand accounts that warn people of the consequences of nuclear weapons.
“Today,” Tanaka wrote in the Times, “the nuclear taboo is on the verge of collapse. The current wars in Europe and the Middle East involving nuclear-armed states, in which there are strong grounds for believing international law is being violated on a regular basis, and threats by the belligerents to use nuclear weapons are weakening the taboo over deploying them. India and Pakistan thankfully did not use their nuclear arsenals in a recent conflict, but the skirmish reminded us how wars between nuclear powers can happen.”
Wrestling with the moral implications of historical events is what enables us to grow leaders who are capable of dealing with the crises of the world to come. And to grow adults who can think beyond simplistic campaign slogans and elect leaders who understand the responsibilities put upon them.
Right now, we are failing not just our students, but their progeny and our society.
“Fixing” state testing isn’t the answer.
Reimagining public education in a way that again allows it to push students to learn to deal critically with moral issues, is.
If we truly wish to honor the hibakusha so that their stories, and the tragic loses they suffered, aren’t repeated or forgotten, we will restore moral teaching to the liberal arts curriculum, and demand our students reach this higher goal.
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I would invite you to learn more about the science of reading. One important component is reading comprehension, not just phonics. In fact we now screen for that on the new VALLSS that replaced PALS in kindergarten.