The Scarsdale Inquirer – Hometown newspaper of Scarsdale, New York 10583

October 21, 2011

Editorial

Non sibi

Scarsdale schools already rank high in self-esteem. The school district has disdained to play the rankings game with Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report and has gone on record time and time again against excessive testing and for local control of the curriculum. So why did the school district enter Scarsdale High School sophomores in the global Programme for International Student Assessment competition in 2007? Did we need to prove that our kids, when not dragged down by their less well-educated compatriots in other school districts, could rank among the best in the world?

Education is improved by analyzing what works in high-performing districts and figuring out how to replicate it.

That our students did outscore all the other PISA nations was nice to know, but that wasn’t the object of the exercise. Rather the scores became a basis for a joint research study with Teachers College, Columbia University, to find out what high-performing schools in Scarsdale, Finland, Canada, Australia and China have in common.

The Scarsdale Board of Education heard a report on the first two phases of the study Monday night. Researchers observed classes at Edgewood, Scarsdale Middle School and Scarsdale High School and schools in Perth, Toronto and Singapore, to assess critical, creative, perceptual, ethical and global student thinking. They found out that these successful schools used similar approaches to instruction; they encouraged active participation by students rather than passive absorption of data and noted that all of the schools, especially Scarsdale, were strong in teacher development. Scarsdale Teachers Institute was cited for “setting an example for teachers and students,” said Sheridan Blau, the Teachers College professor who made the presentation last week.

So yes, it’s nice to toot Scarsdale’s horn, but more important to get the message across that education is improved not by high-stakes testing but by analyzing what works in high-performing districts (and countries) and figuring out how to replicate it.

In the 10 years since Scarsdale parents, with the tacit approval of the school administration, took to the streets to protest an increase in standardized testing, the situation has only gotten worse. First there were the state mandates on testing in fourth and eighth grades. Then there was No Child Left Behind and most recently, the Race to the Top, tying aid to education to improved test scores, and the ill-conceived plan to grade teachers based on their students’ performance. All this emphasis on testing and competition has done little besides raising the stress level in classrooms and making kids hate school. One might well ask, if teachers are spending so much time teaching to the tests why aren’t students’ scores higher?

The most horrifying result of the testing mania we’ve heard about occurred in Waterbury, Conn., where teachers were found to not only have altered the students’ answers to improve the test scores (reportedly under orders from the principal), but actually involved the kids themselves in the deception, thus teaching them to cheat.

The Columbia researchers found that effective learning is most likely to result from extensive student autonomy, a cross-grade, cross-disciplinary focus on real-world problem solving and extracurricular activities that foster collaboration and global citizenship. They saw examples of this on every level that they observed in Scarsdale, but we aren’t perfect. The researchers did recommend a greater emphasis on media literacy and on global and perceptual/ethical thinking. It will be interesting to hear what they find out when they study high-performing schools in China and Finland next year.

A case can be made that the old model for measuring academic success — rote learning and testing of facts — is obsolete in a world with global connections and volumes of information on every conceivable subject available on the Internet at the touch of a finger. What’s needed now are critical and analytical skills to help our children make sense of it all and figure out ways to solve the increasingly complex problems of an interconnected world.

Today’s graduates will be competing with their peers in other countries for future jobs, so we have no choice but to keep our eye on the international arena, and share our successes.

We should be proud of our school district for participating in this important study, “non sibi” — not for our greater glory — but that others might benefit.

Read more local coverage of your hometown in this week’s issue of The Scarsdale Inquirer. Newsstand copies are available at several locations listed above, or subscribe today for convenient home delivery.

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