by Salman Khan
Were the new tests more reliable than the old tests? I have no idea. And that’s really the point. It’s awfully difficult to appraise the quality of tests except by way of the test results. Are they reasonably consistent? Do they more or less conform to what experts think they should be? What politicians want them to be? It’s all rather circular. Again, I don’t deny the importance of testing, and I’m certainly not suggesting we do away with it. What I’m urging, though, is a measure of skepticism and caution in how much weight we give to test results alone. The accuracy and meaningfulness of test results should never be taken for granted.
Tracking Creativity
In our own, more politically sensitive—or perhaps more hypocritical—time, people don’t openly talk about curtailing the educational opportunities of a large part of the population so as to assure a large and docile supply of manual workers. Besides, manual workers are no longer what society needs; increasingly, all around the world, mind workers are what’s called for. Still, our educational model, with its deeply flawed system of testing and grading, effectively deprives many students of the chance to reach their full potential. They are labeled early and treated accordingly.
Whether the process is called tracking or whether it’s known by some kinder, gentler (and less honest) name, the upshot is the same. It’s a process of exclusion, which is exactly the opposite of what our schools should be trying to accomplish. To be successful in a competitive and interconnected world, we need every mind we have; to solve our common problems regarding relations among peoples and the health of our planet, we need all the talent and imagination we can find. What sense does it make to effectively filter out a percentage of kids so early in the game, to send the message that they probably have nothing to contribute? What about the late bloomers? What about the possible geniuses who happen to look at problems differently from most of us and may not test well at an early age?
Let’s stay for a moment with this notion of differentness when it comes to problem-solving. Isn’t this simply another way of defining creativity? In my view, that’s exactly what it is, and the troubling fact is that our current system of testing and grading tends to filter out the creative, different-thinking people who are most likely to make major contributions to a field.
An entire book could be written about education and creativity: how to measure it, how to foster it, and whether it can be taught at all. The bottom line is that we know it when we see it. It is that ability to see something in an entirely new way, to create something from scratch, to explore ideas that never existed before. It also transcends subject matter and variety of expertise. Bob Dylan is massively creative, but so was Isaac Newton. Pablo Picasso saw the world in ways that it had never been seen before, but so did Richard Feynman. Or Marie Curie. Or Steve Jobs.
There are two related points I’m driving at here. The first is that creativity in general tends to be egregiously underappreciated and often selected against in our schools. The second point—and in my view this is nothing short of tragic—is that many educators fail to see math, science, and engineering as “creative” fields at all.
Even as our world is being daily transformed by breathtaking innovations in science and technology, many people continue to imagine that math and science are mostly a matter of memorizing formulas to get “the right answer.” Even engineering, which is in fact the process of creating something from scratch or putting things together in novel and non-self-evident ways, is perplexingly viewed as a mechanical or rote subject. This viewpoint, frankly, could only be held by people who never truly learned math or science, who are stubbornly installed on one side of the so-called Two Culture divide. The truth is that anything significant that happens in math, science, or engineering is the result of heightened intuition and creativity. This is art by another name, and it’s something that tests are not very good at identifying or measuring. The skills and knowledge that tests can measure are merely warm-up exercises.
Consider an analogy. Imagine if we assessed student dancers purely by their flexibility or their strength. If we judged student painters purely by their ability to mix colors perfectly or draw exactly what they see. If we appraised aspiring writers purely by their mastery of grammar or vocabulary. What would we actually be measuring? At best, we’d be measuring certain attributes and prerequisites that would be helpful or necessary for the practice of these respective crafts. Would the measurements say anything about an individual’s potential for true artistry? For greatness? No.
The situation is similar in science and mathematics and engineering. It’s true that one is unlikely to get very far in those fields without a good grasp of the basics—the grammar and vocabulary, if you will, of those disciplines. But it does not follow that the “best-performing” student—that is, the one with the greatest facility for catching on quickly at a certain level of understanding, and therefore the one with the highest test scores—will necessarily end up as the most accomplished scientist or engineer. That will depend on creativity, passion, and originality—things that begin where testing leaves off.
The danger of using assessments as reasons to filter out students, then, is that we may overlook or discourage those whose talents are of a different order—whose intelligence tends more to the oblique and the intuitive. At the very least, when we use testing to exclude, we run the risk of squelching creativity before it has a chance to develop.
Recall for a moment the case of my cousin Nadia and her botched math placement test. Nadia was lucky. Her parents were involved and proactive; her school was attentive and responsive. If things had worked out just a little less well, Nadia would have been excluded from her best chance to learn higher math. She would have been labeled one of the less smart kids, and a whole chain of negative consequences would have emerged from that. Her own confidence would have been shaken. Teachers’ expectations of her would have been lowered and, human nature being what it is, her self-expectations would probably have followed. Chances are she would have gotten less effective teachers after that, since the brightest and most motivated teachers tend to work with the “fastest” classes, and the “slow” kids get… well, the slow classes.
And all of this might have happened because of one snapshot test, administered on one morning in the life of a twelve-year-old girl—a test that didn’t even test what it purported to be testing! The exam, remember, claimed to be measuring math potential—that is, future performance. Nadia did poorly on it because of one past concept that she’d misunderstood. She has cruised through every math class she’s ever taken since (she took calculus as a sophomore in high school). What does this say about the meaningfulness and reliability of the test? Yet we look to exams like this to make crucial, often irreversible, and deceptively “objective” decisions regarding the futures of our kids.
Homework
In our current muddled and contentious state of play when it comes to education, it seems that anything can become a battleground for competing ideologies and strongly held opinions, whether or not those opinions can be backed up by solid evidence or data. So I have found it fascinating to follow recent controversies regarding homework—a seemingly benign topic that has lately given rise to passionate if not necessarily well-informed arguments.
A recent article in the New York Times opened with a bit of domestic drama:
After Donna Cushlanis’s son kept bursting into tears midway through his second-grade math problems, which one night took over an hour, she told him not to do all of his homework.
“How many times do you have to add seven plus two?” [the mother] asked. “I have no problem with doing homework, but that put us both over the edge.”6
It so happened that Ms. Cushlanis was a secretary at the suburban school district of Galloway, New Jersey, and she spoke of her qualms about her second grader’s homework burden to the superintendent of schools. The superintendent assured her that the district was already in the midst of reevaluating its homework policies, and was considering new
guidelines limiting homework to ten minutes for each school grade; that is, ten minutes a night for first graders, twenty minutes for second graders, and so on. This approach, at the very least, seemed tidy and systematic… but what was it really based on? Why should teachers and administrators feel confident that this was the right amount of homework?
What is the right amount of homework? This seems like a simple enough question. It isn’t. So let’s let it simmer awhile while we pursue our discussion.
The homework battle that was going on in Galloway, New Jersey, seemed to summarize a controversy that was brewing everywhere. For every parent like Ms. Cushlanis, who believed her child was being unduly and unhealthily stressed, there was an equally caring parent who felt that her child’s education was inadequate and lacking in rigor. “Most of our kids can’t spell without spell check or add unless it comes up on the computer,” said one such mom, quoted in the Times article. “If we coddle them when they’re younger, what happens when they get into the real world?”
Some Galloway parents claimed that excessive homework constituted a sort of “second shift” of school, an unreasonable preemption of time that should be used for playing, socializing, finding pollywogs. Against this viewpoint, one adult voiced the somewhat dated but nevertheless sincere conviction that “part of growing up is having a lot of homework every day. You’re supposed to say, ‘I can’t come out and play because I have to stay in and do homework.’ ”
As it was in suburban New Jersey, so it was in school districts around the country and the world. Some people argued for more homework, some for less. Various experimental programs were put in place. Some schools made homework “optional.” Some schools put aggregate limits on homework, which created a nightmarish chore for teachers who had to coordinate how much they assigned. Some school districts essentially played semantic games, now calling after-school assignments “goal work” rather than homework. Other schools banned homework on weekends or before vacation breaks; some took the interesting step of forbidding homework on the evening before major standardized exams, perhaps sending the message that it was okay for kids to be stressed and exhausted except when taking tests that might reflect on the performance of the school itself.
Nor was all this angst and uncertainty about homework restricted to U.S. schools. At a time when test results are compared globally, and cross-border college and even prep school applications are at an all-time high, the anxiety and contention were contagious. In Toronto, an edict banned homework for kindergartners and for older kids on school holidays. The controversy reached as far as the Philippines, where the education department opposed weekend assignments so kids could enjoy their childhoods.
Interestingly, students themselves seemed to disagree as virulently as their parents and teachers about the proper amounts and uses of homework. The New York Times education blog, “The Learning Network,” invited middle-schoolers and teens to weigh in on the subject.7 The preponderance of the posts, not surprisingly, were complaints about having too much still to do when the school day was over. Yet even allowing for some adolescent overstatement and melodrama, a few of the comments were disturbing if not heartbreaking. One ninth-grade girl wrote that “I came home at 4 pm and finished homework by 2 am. We couldn’t go to dinner because I had too much homework. I couldn’t talk to my Mom, Dad, or sister…. So yes. I think I have too much homework. And no. It doesn’t really help…. I just copied everything I saw without any of the actual information being absorbed just to be done with the work. Homework ruined my life.”
Distressingly, a recurring motif in the student comments was the subject of sleep deprivation. One seventh grader reported that she was routinely doing homework “until at least midnight. It’s just too much!… It’s just not healthy to get 6–7 hours of sleep each night.” (Children up to age twelve, according to the National Sleep Foundation, should have ten to eleven hours of sleep per night. Teenagers require around nine and a quarter.) Another middle-schooler complained that “the whole year, our LA [language arts] teacher has taught us how to get by on 6 hours of sleep [and to] drain our brains dry of creative [thinking].” It’s a little difficult to imagine what pedagogical purpose is served by having a generation of kids sleepwalk through their preteen and early teenage years.
Not all the student respondents were clamoring for less homework. Some were asking for better homework—challenging, meaningful assignments rather than the “busywork” that was often handed out. If the initiative shown by these students was heartening, it also pointed out a little-discussed deficiency in our traditional way of training teachers. According to a journal article called “Teacher Assessment of Homework,” by a researcher named Stephen Aloia, the rather surprising fact was that “most teachers do not take courses specifically on homework during teacher training.”8 Lesson plans, yes; techniques for guiding classroom activities, yes; homework, no. It’s as if homework is an afterthought, some strange gray area that is still the responsibility of students but not so much for teachers. According to Harris Cooper, author of The Battle over Homework, when it comes to crafting homework assignments, “most teachers are winging it.” No wonder homework is sometimes seen by students—and parents—as a tedious waste of time.
On the other hand, when homework is demanding and meaningful, some students, at least, appreciate the difference. One high school junior commented in the Times blog that “at my old school, I got a lot more homework. At my new prep school I get less. The difference: I spend much more time on my homework at my current school because it is harder. I feel as if I actually accomplish something with the harder homework.”
This sentiment was echoed by the same seventh grader who complained about being up until midnight every night. “We should be getting harder work, not more work!”
Given the eminent reasonableness of this suggestion, why do so many of our schools continue to focus on the quantity of homework rather than the quality? In part, the reason is simply that quantity, by definition, is easy to measure; quality is a far more subtle concept. Send kids home with four hours of homework, and you have at least a simulacrum of academic rigor.
But the more interesting question is why we have adopted this pile-it-on mentality in the first place. There is a swinging pendulum when it comes to attitudes about homework, and that pendulum has been in more or less constant motion for at least a hundred years. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the main purpose of homework was thought to be “training the mind” for the largely clerical, repetitive kinds of jobs that the trend toward urbanization and office work required; thus the emphasis was on memory drills, pattern recognition, rules of grammar—things that disciplined the mind but did not necessarily expand it. In the Progressive Era of the 1920s there was a reaction against this; rote memorization went out of fashion in favor of creative problem solving and self-expression. During the 1940s, homework was briefly out of vogue altogether, and this was probably a consequence of wartime. Young men were being sent off to die; let them enjoy their childhoods in the meantime.
Then in the 1950s came an event that, in the United States at least, created a crisis of national self-esteem and a panic regarding our educational methods and standards. That event was the launching of Sputnik. The Soviets had put a satellite into space. They had succeeded where the United States failed. They had won a contest in which each nation had invested a great deal of capital, both financial and psychological.
In terms of practical consequences, the “space race” turned out to be little more than a propaganda opportunity for whichever side seemed to be winning at a given moment. In the wake of the Sputnik embarrassment, however, one thing seemed absolutely clear: American kids were falling behind and needed to do more science homework.
In retrospect, this response—and certainly its virulence—was a little screwy; at the same time, it provides a vivid and chastening example of how adults tend to project their anxieties onto their children. Had Soviet kids launched Sputnik? Had American kids ma
de U.S. rockets crash on the launchpad? The space race in those years was largely a contest between the scientists that each side had inherited from Germany and Hungary in the wake of World War II; what did kids have to do with it? Then too, the Soviet Union was dedicating a far larger share of its GDP to rocketry and the military. No matter. As was widely reported and endlessly repeated, Soviet kids, from the age of nine onward, were doing twice as much math and science homework as their American peers.9
Clearly, America’s national prestige if not the very survival of democracy depended on closing the homework gap. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, kids went home with a lot of crisp new biology and physics textbooks, and ground down a lot of Number 2 pencils working endless problems in introductory algebra, geometry, and especially trigonometry, which was useful for working out the trajectory of missiles.
Not surprisingly, the homework pendulum soon swung back. By the mid-1960s, homework was coming “to be seen as a symptom of excessive pressure on students…. Learning theories again questioned the value of homework and raised its possible detrimental consequences for mental health.”10
True to the pattern, however, homework rose again during the next U.S. crisis of confidence—the spasm of worry occasioned by the economic rise of Japan in the early 1980s. As with Sputnik, Japan’s success led to a flurry of sincere if sometimes misdirected national soul-searching. What were they doing right that we were doing wrong? Was it their consensual management style? Their relentless work ethic? Were they just plain smarter? Maybe it had to do with… homework!
