In my experience, communication skills, initiative, and the ability to adapt quickly are the most important skills for job seekers. Increasingly, higher paying jobs also demand creativity, innovation, and a self-directed mindset. Standardized tests measure none of these.

But more to the point, a heavy reliance on these tests predisposes school systems to a factory education approach. The mindset I typically encounter is, “We dont have time to worry about creativity, innovation, or communication… we’ve got to prepare them for the SAT”.

I applaud the idea of rewarding excellent teachers. I also have no problem with paying less money to mediocre teachers. But standardized tests are not a valid way to measure teacher or student excellence.

As for Houston, I’ll have to sheepishly admit that I didn’t read the article you linked to, but I think it’s best to give the Houston school board the benefit of the doubt. Maybe, as you say, there is too much emphasis on standardized testing (I’d probably agree on that in the big picture). I’m just not sure that linking salaries to results is necessarily a bad thing (as long as the salaries don’t go down!). Anyway, thanks for responding to my comments. Cheers and all the best, Nathan

“So for me, the purpose of education isn’t an either/or issue–it’s a both/and issue.”

We’re definitely on the same page here. I, too, believe that a part of a person’s education is preparing for the job market. And yes, performance is certainly something we should all value and strive for. I just think that these aspects tend to be overstressed in public education, often at the expense of personal growth and development of autonomy. In my own writing and thinking, I am often highly critical of the ‘mandatory education as training’ approach, because I think the system is too caught up in it to be healthy.

As for standardized tests - they are good tools when triangulated with other evaluation methods. But to link teachers pay to student performance on them is crime. If you are a low-paid teacher, with a mortgage, three kids, car and insurance payments, etc, and you have an opportunity to earn more for higher scores, you are going to immediately put most of your energy into preparing students for the test, are you not? “To hell with learning and process! I want results and I want them now!” This is what is being implicitly encouraged when schoolboards implement policies like they did in Houston. These school board members associate learning and academic growth with performance on standardized tests - merely. That’s not learning, it’s just training. Training is a very important part of an education, but it isn’t everything. It needs to be balanced, as you suggest with other aspects of an education. It’s and both/and issue. So I ask: why is it either/or in Houston?

Thanks again, Nathan, for your comments. Take care….

Thanks for your courteous and engaging response. I think we both agree that education should be about the full development of students as human beings. For me, that would include preparing them for the workforce. Put another way, if education doesn’t prepare a student for the workforce, the student is suddenly put in a situation where he can’t function, and hence, can’t earn money. Education will have failed him or her. I wouldn’t want to be that student.

Also, many of the problems in the world today require more than good hearts. To take an extreme example: an African village peopled with wonderfully good persons suffers from contaminated water. They need an engineer with good credentials, some who has mastered a certain amount of chemistry, engineering, environmental issues and the like to help them. Yet another person with a good heart won’t be enough.

There are many Korean students like you described, students who can score well on standardized tests, but who can’t have even an elementary conversation. However, in that case, I think the fault lies with the standardized tests in question. I think it would be wrong to consider all standardized tests equally bad. ESL tests seem to be worse than average. It’s significant that in this regard that the new TOEFL iBT has been completely redesigned to emphasize speaking, listening, language production (oral and written), and integrated tasks. That’s a step in the right direction, as more holistic preparation will be required to pass the test.

So for me, the purpose of education isn’t an either/or issue–it’s a both/and issue.

Anyway, I look forward to continuing to read your thought-provoking blog. Stay in touch & take care, Nathan

Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to this posting. I appreciate your sharing your ideas.

The questions I asked were not rhetorical, but rather real ones. I really find it difficult to comprehend how financially rewarding teachers for their students’ performances on standardized tests could be of service to the community.

Education, in my opinion, should not be primarily about training for employment, but rather about self-discovery and learning, whatever form that may take. As each person is different, the institution should be arranged to respond intelligently to those differences and cultivate the development of each individual according to his or her needs. By training students to take standardized tests, we ignore their individuality and force them into a situation about which they have little choice. They no longer have a stake in the direction their learning takes, nor are their personal interersts celebrated in any way. The result is that those who succeed are the ones who are able to separate themselves internally from their passions and focus on outward results - unless, of course, their passions happen to be conforming and pleasing superiors, or winning competitions. These are the people who reap the rewards of the system and often end up in structured positions of power.

I can’t help but think of what type of world we are bringing into being this way. If a given community decides to give financial based incentives to teachers, why don’t they give the students the a significant say in who receives those rewards?

I always performed well on standardized tests, yet I was never very good at cooperating as a youngster. It was only encouraged verbally, never actually. What counted was individual performance and results. It took the fun out of learning and placed it on winning. Studying was like training for fight, rather than enjoying a good meal. What matters in my vision of a good education is the process over the results. And I think we if focus on creating a process that is enjoyable and stimulating, the results will take care of themselves, as you suggest in your last paragraph.

I’ve met plenty of high scorers on the TOEIC here in Japan. Yet, their high marks, I’ve found, have little to do with their communicative ability, which hinges more on empathy, sensitivity, and openness; rather than knowing when to use the present perfect or the present perfect progressive. When it comes to bringing a peaceful society into being, would you rather have good communicators in charge, or high test scorers? I’ll take the former any day.

I have subscribed to your blog and will be reading. Thanks again. Looking forward to more correspondence.

I often see teachers and EFL specialists asking questions like this, but I really don’t think many of them have ever thought about the answers. From the tone of your post, it seems you’ve already prejudiced the discussion.

Were those real questions you asked, or only rhetorical ones? Can you really see no benefits whatsoever? Strong (not mediocre) performance on standardized tests like the SAT is usually a good indicator of mastery of the subject. Mastery usually indicates that a certain amount of thought and hard work have taken place. Hard work and the ability to think clearly are excellent attributes for people of any age. Of course business leaders are going to want to see that their new hires can work hard, think clearly, attain mastery of a field, focus on solving problems, and attain results!

Furthermore, as you and I both know, employment in this world is dependent on results. Education, at least in my opinion, should prepare children both to be humane, cultured, empathetic humans, and also to enter the workforce, which is an unavoidable necessity, and not necessarily a bad thing.

My only problem, incidentally, with what the Houston school board (and many others like it) is doing is that there are often many more variables present in a class than the teacher can control. For example, a former teacher had a blind student with a seeing eye dog in his class. In the same class, he had several students with diagnosed learning disabilities. He told me that all the students in that class were quite nice, which was fortunate. On the other hand, he wasn’t able to take it as far as he was used to.

To close, I will provide you with two examples of how standardized tests do actually indicate something. A fellow I know studied hard in English class, read extensively outside of class, responded thoughtfully to what he read, and pulled off a 5/5 on the College Board’s AP English exam. The same student didn’t study hard in math, and actually had a bad attitude towards math as a school subject. He failed his provincial math exam at the end of his term of study. He didn’t, however, complain about standardized testing, he only felt bad that he didn’t study more. It was, fortunately, the only test he has ever failed, but it was a lesson to him. Ironically, he now wishes he studied harder. That student was me.

By the way, I attended a presentation on the new TOEFL iBT by someone working in the test-prep community some months ago. He argued very strongly that the best test prep for the new test would actually be genuine general conversational English courses using communicative-based, task-based, integrated approaches to English.