The New Balance philosophy of testing

Before interviews of all types, I've found it valuable to try to match the dress code of the people I'm visiting. Bear with me here, this is policy-relevant.

When I go up to the state government offices in Lansing, I wear my brown Oxford-style Dockers. Around the poli sci department, I usually wear a beat-up pair of New Balance, or maybe sandals in the summer. When I'm in the policy school, I often go back to khakis and Dockers because it's a professional school and that's just the way people dress.

Key insight: picking shoes is not about blending in -- it's about shared perspective. By dressing the way others dress, I try to indicate that I see the world the way they see it. Picking the right shoes for an interview is a kind of attiristic* code-switching.

Testing is a lot like checking to see if people are wearing the "right" shoes. As Vihao suggests in his comment, the goal is to make sure that students can make decisions more or less the way that we would make decisions. When they demonstrate the "right" kind of thinking, we know that we can trust their judgment and turn them loose on the world.

In the best case, we know that our decisions are fallible and so we don't try to force too much conformity -- just enough to have a common language for approaching problems. As with shoes, we don't usually demand complete conformity, just an appreciation of the symbolic significance of their actions. In good tests, the real goal is to demonstrate fluency, not correctness.

Examples include: recitals, portfolio evaluations, essays, debates, "show your work" math problems, and discussions, including (I can't resist) the cultural awareness test that Calvin fails in this strip. None of these tests has a right answer, but there are still implicit standards for what constitutes good work.

The subjects with right and wrong answers are exceptions that prove the rule. For elementary math, grammar, and the boring kind of history ("What year was the battle of Waterloo?") correctness is easy to judge because everyone agrees on what the right answers are. But the goal is still to make sure that students are speaking the same language that everyone else is.

Launch point: I've made some big claims about what testing should and shouldn't be. What do you think? Have you seen examples of this kind of testing at work, school, etc.? Or am I all wrong this time?

* Attiristic: adj. An invented word meaning, "pertaining to dress and clothing." (Does anyone know a real word that means what I want to say here?)

I know, I know...

It's been too long since I've posted. I've been trying to figure out how to bring together Karen's comment about testing non-content-related standards, Vihao's comment on how face to face interviews catch information that paper tests miss, and Sherry's comment about how what students plan to do after school should have an impact on what they're learning in schools.

I suppose I can ask another blue-sky question: how close can a test get to measuring real "education"?

You can't improve what you can't measure

I'm still responding to the emails and comments from my last post. Thanks, all, for the good discussions.

Today I want to respond to a comment I've heard many times -- most recently from my long-lost high school buddy Vihao:

"standardized education assumes everybody is the same. i say get rid of standardized tests and make curriculum more flexible to allow students to spend more time pursuing subjects they enjoy..."

I completely agree that teaching needs to involve students and speak to the things that are relevant and interesting to them. If it were possible, I'd support an IEP for every child. Check out www.longtaillearners.com for an interesting extrapolation of this theme.

But I don't believe that embracing individualized learning means we have to reject standardized testing. Let me try an analogy.


A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I moved to a new apartment. Except for campus and Kroger, we have to get on the highway to go just about anywhere. Since there are three ways to get to the onramp (and because we are both Type A people), we timed ourselves driving to and from the highway several times and compared. The verdict? Dhu Varren to Green to 23 going south, and Barton to I-14 going north or west. (Not that you care; this is just an analogy.)

Picking the best way to get to the highway is like improving schools. There are lots of reasonable sounding ways to accomplish both tasks, but to do either intelligently, you need some metric to use as a baseline for comparison. For roads, the metric was our dashboard clock. For schools, the best available metric is standardized tests.

You can't improve what you can't measure. The paradox here is that standardized tests can give teachers more flexibility in the way they run their classrooms.

PS - A sidenote that I have to include every time I talk about tests: many of the standardized tests currently in use are bad or really bad. This isn't because we don't know how to do better; it's because many states put in slipshod assessments hoping that accountability reform would just go away. We definitely need to devote more attention to fixing these badly designed testing systems.

Calvin asks, "Why are schools boring?"

A question and a challenge for you:

First, the question. According to wikipedia, "a School is an institution designed to allow and encourage students ... to learn, under the supervision of teachers." Learning, in my experience, is not usually boring.


(Click to enlarge.)

So why is it that schools are so boring? According to my friend Calvin, they're not just sometimes dull -- boredom is the dominant emotion associated with school. Why is the one setting designed specifically for intellectual stimulation the setting most strongly associated with flat-out mind-numbingness?

And next, my challenge: what would it take to run a school without boredom?

PS: This C&H strip is linked from www.s-anand.net/calvinandhobbes.html#19870517, a site worth having bookmarked. (Is it legal? I have no idea.)
This strip is also instructive.

Reintroducing myself...

My name is Abe Gong. My goal is to learn how to make better schools.

I'm a first-year public policy and political science PhD student at the University of Michigan. I'm interested in institutional design, behavioral economics, and far-from-equilibrium dynamics in organizational change, especially as they yield practical approaches to improving K-12 education. When relatives ask, I usually say I study "school reform." Methodologically speaking, I lean quantitative, interdisciplinary, and pragmatic.

Politically, I'm a progressive moderate. I believe that accountability reform might work for the American K-12 system, but there are a lot of kinks to iron out first. The status quo is unacceptable.