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Typical Education Reform Isn't the Answer: John Abbott on Transforming Education

John Abbott speaks on the shortcomings and inadequacy of typical ‘back to basics’ educational reform.

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John Abbott is the President of the [[http://www.21learn.org/|21st Century Learning Initiative]], an initiative to facilitate the emergence of new approaches to learning in the United Kingdom.

-Unknown

Standardized tests can’t measure initiative, creativity, imagination, conceptual thinking, curiosity, effort, irony, judgment, commitment, nuance, good will, ethical reflection, or a host of other valuable dispositions and attributes.

-Alfie Kohn

Concepts like intrinsic motivation and intellectual exploration are hard for the prosaic mind to grasp, whereas test scores, like sales figures or votes, can be calculated and charged and used to define success and failure.

-Alfie Kohn

Any aspect of learning (or life) that resists being reduced to numbers is regarded as vaguely suspicious.

-Charles Ungerleider

Politicians of widely divergent political orientations think testing students will improve learning. Testing has increased dramatically in the past ten years, and if it worked in the simplistic way that some politicians seem to think, kids today would be the most learned students ever.

-Linda McNeil

It is easier to measure efficiency than effectiveness, easier to rate how well we are doing something than to ask if hat we are doing makes sense. …the process of coming to understand ideas in a classroom is not always linear or quantifiable.

Emphasis on standards and results: (1) undermines -Alfie Kohn

Emphasis on standards and results: (1) undermines students’ interest in learning, (2) makes failure seem overwhelming, (3) leads students to avoid challenging themselves, (4) reduces the quality of learning, and (5) invites students to think about how smart they are instead of how hard they tried.

Student achievement report: What do standardized tests tell us about Canadian students today?

How much and how well are our children learning in school? Do they have the skills to succeed in tomorrow’s world? Parents, students, employers, and the general public all want the answer to these questions, and governments and educators have designed a range of tools for monitoring and reporting learning outcomes and performance to measure the success of our learning systems.
(Source: Canadian Council on Learning)

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