Standardized Testing and Education Reform

From The Atlantic:

Studies indicate that Asian students achieve some of the highest scores in the world in math and science comparisons. However, owing to excessive focus on memorization, done solely for the purpose of passing tests, these gloomy idiot savants demonstrate surprisingly little practical know-how and often are unable to apply what they've learned. And this is the educational system we mistakenly aspire to, argues Alexandra Robbins, who traces the U.S. overachiever culture back to the President Reagan's 1983 Department of Education report "A Nation At Risk."

While I'd still rather have the test scores of Singapore than the test scores of Lousiana, I think American educators need to remember that memorizing abstract facts for the purpose of tests quickly leads to forgetting. As I wrote in my last Seed article on the new neuroscience of learning:

This is the paradoxical flaw of standardized testing--in the rush to quantify learning, it discourages the sort of teaching that actually gets results. Instead of learning by doing, children are forced to memorize a random-seeming body of knowledge. Even if students pass the test, they never learn what to do with all their new information. As a result, they quickly fo get the lesson plan--probably while dreaming at night.

What we need is more John Dewey and less No Child Left Behind.