Creativity and Schools

I recently attended a workshop on creativity. It was specifically designed for people who work in schools and the idea behind it was that teachers needed to be creative in order to provide instruction that is differentiated based on students' needs. There were also many elements included in the workshop that teachers could use to help their students develop their creativity. The nice thing about this workshop is that I didn't sit there thinking I was wasting my time and I didn't want to call out, "Bullshit!" at any point. This was a truly rare experience.


The longer I work in education, the more I want, and need, to yell, "Bullshit!" I am particularly inclined to feel this need when I think about what schools could do to help children discover their creativity versus what they actually are doing these days. The worst part of it is that the legislation under which we work (NCLB) and the more recent grant requirements (RttT) make it clear that the thing our governments (federal and state) want us to focus on the most is students' test scores.


Creativity is at the heart of things like innovation, art, entrepreneurship, research and development, and solving problems. Creativity is also difficult to quantify. Herein lies the irony of our current educational policies and "reform" efforts: we want better education for all students because we will need them to be entrepreneurs and inventors ("job creators" in election-season-speak) when they are adults; we want to measure this better education through test scores, like the PISA, in which we compare our students to students in other countries, with the goal that our students score at the top. I'm sorry to have to tell you all this, but you can't have both.


Yong Zhao recently wrote an article for Education Week in which he gives a very clear explanation of this problem and even provides data(!) which show that countries in which students perform very well on the PISA are usually those with the lowest levels of entrepreneurship. But we've known this for a while. Why haven't we stopped the big push for higher test scores?


Well, I think there are several reasons. First, I think many actual entrepreneurs have made quite a bit of money from our obsession with testing and from our politicians' insistence that our schools are terrible. The cynical side of me sees this as the real intention of the politicians who have made the most hay of our so-called failure. People like Joel Klein and  Michelle Rhee have made a lot of money. They are very friendly with some politicians who are quite vocal in their disapproval of our public schools and of teachers' unions. This brings me to the second reason we're still being pushed by test scores: to crush teachers' unions. Republicans (primarily, though not exclusively) have found that they have been very successful in discrediting teachers' unions when they have focused relentlessly on standardized test scores.  


I also think that there is a general insecurity that permeates the teaching profession which prevents teachers from arguing, publicly, with leaders of all kinds. And, there hasn't really been a venue for them because they have been completely excluded from the conversation. But why do they accept this exclusion? Why aren't they organizing national strikes and demonstrations to force their leaders to listen to what they have to say? I'm not sure why the unions and those politicians who can see the bigger educational picture haven't been more insistent on refocusing the conversation about public schools away from test scores. But, teachers -- why have you bought into this mindset? If we must think of our students as future employees (which I think is the wrong way to think about them), we should remember this: when we ask business leaders what qualities they look for in employees, they never say, "high scores on the PISA." They identify things like problem-solving ability, collaborative skills, creativity, ambition. We used to be good at turning out graduates from our public schools who had those traits. If we keep down this idiotic path, I'm afraid we'll end up with a bunch of job candidates who are looking for employers who phrase everything as a multiple-choice question.