On Standards and Diversity

Teaching, learning, and testing

Teaching, learning, and testing are an integral parts of a successful education system. With an ever growing student body and higher education being accessible to more and more people, it becomes increasingly challenging to compare the quality of education. Testing is essential. But how do we test? And how can we compare tests from different schools, student populations, curricula, and teaching methods? National and international testing for the purpose of evaluating national standing are more and more popular. The results are taken very seriously and used to reshape national (US) education policy, shifting money, producing and selling text books, providing tutoring services, and last but not least, defining content and 'real life' importance about the things we teach our kids including science, religion, and sex.

Embracing Diversity

A good education is an education that is accessible to everyone, and to everyone at the same quality. The result is an equality that we have come to expect in our lives. But we also have come to expect a recognition of diversity, the very antithesis of equality. To provide equal education to a diverse student population thus requires to define precisely what we mean by equality and what we mean by diversity.

All men are created equal. This is the insight of centuries of fighting for liberty and freedom for all. And yet we all have different experiences. We are in fact not equal by birth or by opportunity. We are diverse in every sense of the imagination except of course for the rights enshrined in the Constitution - the right to be treated equally before the law. Beyond these political rights, we cherish diversity on the bases of inclusiveness rather than discrimination. In real life, this distinction seems not always possible or even desired. We use words like equal opportunity, but also affirmative action, color blindness, but also ethnic diversity. The common denominator is offering the same opportunities, without suppressing the right to express individual differences, differences that are largely rooted in group associations. We are all unique individuals in search of independence. Yet we stop if the price of equality is the loss of identity with our family, ethnic group, religious belief, or communal activities.

The Right to Free Public Education

To secure both equality and diversity in education, there can be only one goal for our public schools - free education for our children. Education is a privilege as well as a necessity for a democratic society. Yet the right of each individual to have access to learning should not be confused with a guarantee to succeed.

Standardized Testing

Standardized tests reveal a distressing fact of life; that education, while overall good, is not fairly and equally distributed in the industrialized nations. Wealthy communities do better than economically poor ones. School performances can directly be related to the income status of parents. Everyone would like to know, how to change this. Ideas are as plentiful as people interested in this theme. Solutions are as hard to come by as changing the fabric of a society. In the US, where the interest in accountability and use of standardized testing is as high as ever, the solutions to quality and equality in public education have to square with the demand for diversity. The big question then is, how can diversity retain any meaning if the goal of equality is to be achieved by standardized testing. (More information about standardized tests)

Standards of testing are also standards of admission to higher education. Higher education prospers in an environment of student diversity while demanding some form of standardization in testing and admission criteria. Historically, the student body of higher education reflects a class based standard that universities are trying to overcome. Merit based admission procedures are ultimately the fairest way of selection. Merit is a reflection of an individual's academic achievement and this achievement is biased by socioeconomic circumstances, i.e., the rich and the poor. Tests do not measure future ability, they measure past performance. Ultimately, testing should reflect an individual's abilities based on past scholastic, athletic, artistic, and interpersonal skills.

International Programs

PISA The OECD Program for International Student Assessment gauges the achievement of students (age 15) before the end of their high school years from industrialized countries. The tests scrutinize how these young people use their knowledge, rather than just how much they learned in school. This includes assessing how they approach learning, beliefs in their own abilities, motivation, attitudes and the problem-solving skills. PISA has become an important measure for the countries involved and a point of measure to assess national education policies. An important aspect of PISA is measuring literacy. This not only tests knowledge, i.e., the skills of performing a certain task, but also understanding the relevance of knowledge in one's life. Why is it important to know calculus? Why is it important to know a foreign language? Why is it important to study the chemistry of genes? Using science literacy and example, PISA divides assessment thereof into three distinguishable categories: