The Contradiction of the Keystone exams

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.”

A column in EdWeekly this summer wisely made this point in regards to the new, incredibly complex, unreliable - yet state-mandated - teacher evaluations, suggesting that we should have first asked the question, “What is it that we're trying to measure?”  Indeed, that question should have been asked before the state Board of Education voted to mandate ‘Keystone exams’ in English literature, Algebra and Biology as high school graduation requirements.

Here’s the essence of the issue, as I see it: the Keystone exams are fundamentally incompatible with the set of knowledge and skills that students need for success in the modern world.  Mandating them as high school graduation requirements only serves to institutionalize a program of education more appropriate for the middle of the last century. It will reduce opportunities for students, who instead of taking electives in their areas of interest, will be required to take remedial courses in order to pass an exam that measures their ability to memorize and regurgitate information they are unlikely to ever need or use.

I often ask, half in jest, how much of high school biology do you remember? Then how important was it?  Do you know the answer to this sample Keystone Biology exam question: which characteristic is common to prokaryotes & eukaryotes?  If not, why do we now require every high school student to know this?

An important insight I gleaned from my time in business school: a business executive doesn’t need to be an expert on anything; rather, he or she needs to know enough about everything to understand what the experts are saying. This strikes me as a pretty good model for education: develop an expertise in one or two areas of passion, but understand the principles of everything else well enough to see the connections.

So, instead of requiring temporary proficiency in the algorithms of algebra, we should make sure that students understand the basic principles - as well as those of statistics, probability, compound interest, and ‘present-value’ - maybe even how calculus ‘works’, even if you don’t know how to find a derivative. (I once asked my sister, who has been a successful civil engineer for over three decades, how often she used calculus at her job. Her answer: once. Once, in over thirty years! – and that was to solve a brain-teaser heard on the office radio.)

In other words, when students graduate high school, they should have a toolbox for solving real-world problems – as well as some actual experience in doing so. That toolbox would include not only knowledge in the core areas mentioned above, but also well-developed communication and research skills, the capacity for critical-thinking and creativity, and the civic skills that come from years of collaborating with others.

Some years ago, when the Partnership for 21st-century skills began asking college presidents and business leaders what their new students and hires were lacking, that was the list they came up with.  Proficiency in Algebra and Biology were not on the list. This is what we should mean when we say “college and career ready”.  It’s what the unfortunately maligned Common Core standards tries to address.  But that’s a column for another day.

Whenever I talk to parents about what they want in their child’s education, they understand this. Why don’t the policy-makers in Harrisburg get it?