Don't tell me Sartre couldn't read. That is bullshit. Multiple intelligences is great, but if you want to design an educational system where kids don't have to read, then you might as well just get rid of literacy altogether, which is what is happening in this culture.

Oh yeah, who didn't hate school?

Congratulations to Sean Gonsalves for citing testing experts Howard Gardner and Robert Sternberg. Both are correct.

The main problem is the Democrats don't get it: standardized testing is, in the main, bad.

You want to know what prevents teachers from tapping into their creativity to actively engaging their students in learning organized around student centered questioning?
A dull curriculum tied to standardized tests.

You want to know why students are so bored, stuck in a sit and git routine, in most of American schools and classrooms?
A disconnected curriculum tied to standardized tests.

Almost unknown to the corporate mainstream media and most national politicians is that there are thousands of schools that get assessment and accountability right.
1. Schools in Nebraska, for the most part, and under the leadership of the excellent Doug Christenson, basically ignore much of NCLB using instead locally created with some significant teacher involvement assessments to the public how their kids are doing.
2. The national Coalition of Essential Schools, founded by the great Ted Sizer, has for a long time shown the way in promoting assessment for learning and public accountability modeled on performance assessment using kids' actual work in the form of research projects, oral presentations of experiments and the like to better reflect what they know and can do.
3. National prominent educator and founder of several schools in NYC and Boston, Deborah Meier has shown how democratic education organized around active learning, inspiring pedagogy and an accountability model based on performance and portfolio is far better than the bunch o facts, drill and kill model most schools use in helping kids to graduate, go to on and finish college.
4. The New York Performance Assessment Coalition, group of 47 schools, has broken away from much of the controlling testing of New York State and produces far better learning and graduation results by emphasizing deeper level thinking, a more challenging curriculum and graduation by demonstrating through projects, experiments and presentations what students know and can do. (Question for Hillary: when are you going to realize the beautiful alternative to mindless drill and kill testing that thrives in your own state?)
All of these examples are more about what one might call the whole pie approach to accountability, rather than the one slice approach of Ted Kennedy, George Miller, George Bush and the like.
These advocates for educational change that I have mentioned need national level champions who will advocate for reforming NCLB to truly make it serve creative teachers and actively engaged students. Where are they? Other than John Edwards no one seems to get the idea about what you have to put in place of tedious testing.

It's hard to imagine why a Democratic Congress would be in a hurry to reauthorize NCLB, the Republicans' main education presciption, (unless significantly amended, which would probably draw a veto) when Democrats can be reasonably expected to take both Congress and The White House in 2008. We've got war, deficits, a weak dollar, plenty to worry about. What could possibly be useful for either students or teachers to be rushing anything about NCLB? Yet the testmakers will try, no doubt.

Let's not worry about whether or not our children get the right education, let's worry about whether or not the No Child Left Behind pushers and Bush's brother Neil are making money from their programs. The money spent on cockeyed tests and googy programs would be better spent on inovative ways to reach each individual child's potential. Naw, that makes too much sense.

multiple intelligences....

SG says, "Here's my code (idea): before any new fill-in-the-bubble crazy NCLB legislation is considered, let's develop a test that measures multiple intelligences and think up a way to identify teachers' teaching styles."

This issue has already been addressed, better, with structured, simultaneously multi-sensory teaching methodologies. If you teach in a structured manner (connotes logical, not rigid) using simultaneous auditory, visual, and kinesthenic methods, you can reach many different kinds of students as well as develop their other modalities, rather than just playing to their strengths. And anyway, most people are not exclusively or extremely of one type.

These methods are not taught in teacher schools, but have been in use for decades by teachers and educational therapists who couldn't get traction in rigid public school bureaucracies that are impervious to evidence of effectiveness, and are not self-critical or self-improving.

Some examples of these methodologies are Lindamood-Bell, Slingerland, and other Orton-Gillingham methods, and Making Math Real.

The problem is not that nobody has ever thought of this (multiple learning modes) before but that the research and practical application has been kept out of the pipeline from teacher school-provided education and training to public school instruction.

This problem predates NCLB but solving it would go a long way towards improving public schools.

Fixing public schools is more complicated than just railing against tests.

In my humble experience, no kid in a classroom of 35 students is going to get the attention s/he needs to make school pleasurable.
Given continual interrruptions, paperwork and other bullshit a teacher is lucky to devote to each child a single minute per hour.
It probably was as bad or worse for the historical figures mentioned.

Are we trying to teach kids how to enjoy learning or how to enjoy being herded like sheep? (and then graded for appropriate consumption).

Standardized tests indicate how well a student can do on a test, and gives students as much attention as a number gets.
Writing and having their own words READ by adults is very useful, and gives the student better attention.

There is a movement for differentiated indigenous education in South America. Oral transmission and multiple modalities go hand in hand. Where there is transmission of mutiple modalities of say, horticultural, astronomical, ecological knowledge integrated as a spiritual/cultural paradigm - not in a classroom. Astronomical, botanical taxonomic criteria are broader and experientially based and used.

Whether or not we choose ontological humility, the UN declaration of Indigenous Rights is more than words on a piece of paper - it is reaffirmation of even broader modalities of modalities. Read exactly what it is that is protected.

This in no way negates the value of reading and writing for those cultures choosing such a path. Choice is the operative word here and moving through the detritus of gobbleization, the breadth of knowledge beyond the confines of our system will hopefully find support for all cultures as essential to restoring diversity - not to mention ending our own autogenocide whether blatant or systemic.

Literacy programs as have been instituted to 'save' endangered languages in the past are being revisited by linguists.

Doesn't gilding a lily cut of photosynthesis?

Schools are warehouses for keeping kids and (particularly) adolescents off the streets during the day. The other main social function they serve is to give to each citizen a common set of experiences during development. In other words: the main job of schools is to ensure that everybody turns out more or less the same.

Thank you, Sean! I'd had an IQ test at age 5 (144) and another one at 6 (136) -- although I didn't find out about these scores until high school, whereupon I took them to mean that I was getting dumber as I got older. It was pretty depressing. It got even worse when I had to pass Algebra I in order to get a Regents diploma; I gave up trying to understand the subject and memorized the entire textbook in the last two weeks before the exam. I passed -- and almost passed out in the process.

But at 17 I took a comprehensive aptitude test and learned that I'm a mathematical idiot (although I can do arithmetic because it's just memorization). Suddenly my scores made sense. The test I'd had at age 5 didn't include math -- it was verbal. I had a large vocabulary and could read fluently, since I'd learned via phonics. The test at 6 included math.

Reading Howard Gardner's book years later was a sobering experience. My inability to deal with math meant that, if I had been born later and had to take the SAT instead of the old College Boards, I would never have gotten into college. The implications of multiple intelligences, at least in my case, were extreme. I've often wondered how many other people, missing either verbal or math intelligence, are shut out of a college education because the SAT considers only these two gifts to be important. Why can't we catch up with Howard Gardner's insights after all these years?

That we have multiple intelligences is such a great idea but institutions take a long time to change and vested interests want things to remain the same. Two further points I would like to add....we have two memories a short term one and a long time one...this has been known for decades but institutional education and most teachers ignore this FACT. It takes minimal extra work and energy to put information and procedures into long term memory where the forgetting curve is very gradual yet this is not done in most situations. Instead students learn , forget, relearn and then forget producing the horrible cram before the exam experience. While I am telling the world that the King is a nudist I might as well say that it is absurd to place unmotivated kids in with serious students.....everyone gets frustrated and makes for a miserable experience at school. Unmotivated students must be motivated by teaching them in a different way to the others. Homework should be used primarily to bring those students not so gifted in a particular subject up to the other's level so that they do not fall behind. Unmotivated students will not do homework effectively.

The administration wants a passive citizenry. Teaching kids analytical skills vs route memorization/ability to take tests tends to lead to rebellion once they are adults...its always the educated that lead uprisings one only needs to look at the French Revolution or the students at BeiDa (Beijing University) in 1989. So many dictatorships around the world encourage route memorization as a style of learning for a reason.

Match learning styles and teaching styles? Too simple. Most students don't have one learning style exclusively and may be somewhere on the continuum between two learning styles. In theory, matching is intriguing but in practice it does not work.

Children need to be able to follow their interests and passions and be given the time, space and encouragement to do that. Unfortunately with our factory schools we often squelch that. One of the most significant lessons many of us get from school is not to pay attention to our own desires and interests, but rather to do what we are told, and then we struggle the rest of our lives because we are so good at repressing our needs. This can make us passive citizens and good consumers.

Congratulations on your daughter getting through high school--all the best wishes for you and her.

Standards tests and IQ tests are simple tautologies: what do they test? -- the ability to test well on the test. I have as much disdain for "Bell Curve" thinking as the next guy unless you admit the condition that there is a different Bell curve for every imaginable test. Imagine an axis with hundreds or thousands of Bell Curves, and every one of us excelling on some and taking peripheral positions on others. What would this tell us? Precisely nothing (other that we are each, in fact, individuals), which is why the simpletons who came up with IQ tests came up with IQ tests. You've heard of the Mensa group? How about the Densa group? - for those who score low on the Mensa tests.
On the other hand, standards tests (which we can reasonably blame on the Brits) do have one admirable quality: they do in fact prepare a student for life, the post-industrial globalized one. Have you been to a bookstore lately? Chalk full of qualification and certification tests, manuals and guides. You can't MOVE in this economy unless you're properly certified to do so. Oh yes, a child born today will be taking tests for a long, long time. I'd rather be left behind, thank you.

Also, I would like to confirm Mr. Gonsalves's historical note about Beethoven. In one of his musical scores was found the number 18 written several times and then added. The greatest musical genius of all time (my opinion) couldn't multiply.

Good article! I wonder how many lives were ruined on account of the IQ test? Wasn't the initial purpose of the test to identify which fourth grade students of a French schoolteacher (Binnet) would need additional tutoring? Why and how, in the United States, did it morph into this Social Darwinistic scythe and tool for oppression? Sadly, it seems that the oligarchy of this country have no intensions of parting with their penchant for eugenics!

"The administration wants a passive citizenry".

dcbeltway, I agree completely. A very smart woman once told me that teaching someone to read is a political act. My (very limited) experience working within the education system tells me that it is no accident that certain people receive a better education than others, and it's only getting worse - especially at the high school level where in urban areas, students are treated as young criminals, rather than young scholars. This is sometimes not without reason, as I've seen that in some cases, educators are daily threatened with violence by their students. However, disrespect breeds disrespect. A different approach to teaching - perhaps a breaking away from the standardized curriculum that educators are forced to impliment (even when their first hand experience is showing them it is ineffective) - would create a more informed and less apathetic America.

IPENEK, DC BELTWAY and JAMESLAB: Excellent points! A society that demands a work force based on docility in the face of authority, is not going to countenance any exponential growth in its consciousness and political savvy. Enter education that demands conformity and strives for similitude on standardized tests. This is to children what branding is to cattle.