{G} oofy educational ideas spread like kudzu. Every morning, another instructional fad or excuse to lower standards needs uprooting. The latest sprout comes from a collaboration between the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Educational Testing Service (ETS). If it spreads, it could choke out our already wilting commitment to traditional, rigorous academics.
Way back in 1906, the former organization gave us the Carnegie Unit, or credit hour, and the latter outfit has for many decades administered a suite of standardized tests including the SAT and GRE. Together, they provide much of the infrastructure on which our education system runs — an infrastructure that they now seek to dismantle.
In a paper explaining their intentions, they criticize today’s schools for focusing on “a limited set of cognitive skills” — math, reading, historical and scientific knowledge. In a two-part plan, they hope to first dismantle the Carnegie Unit, which measures educational attainment through seat time, and then offer instead a bouquet of “affective skills” such as creativity and collaboration, relying on projects, portfolios, or even transcripts of class discussions to measure them.
The first step is a worthwhile experiment. Why must gifted students sit around waiting for their classmates to catch up? And why, in this era of grade inflation, does a student who sleeps through Algebra II so often get credit? But beware the Greeks bearing gifts.
Their definition of mastery is very different from what most parents want out of an education and what schools can realistically accomplish. Fresh recommendations to educate the “whole child,” not just their intellectual capacities, have cropped up every few years since at least the progressive era. This initiative is just another call to repurpose the role of educator from transmitter of shared knowledge, conveyer of the best that has been thought and said, to life coach or therapist.
We’ve experimented with affective skills before. The descriptor has changed — durable, behavioral, or interpersonal skills, for example — and we’ve failed every time.
The latest obsession with affective skills, social and emotional learning, is facing a deflation of enthusiasm. An evidence review from the RAND Corporation found only a handful of programs at the high-school level with positive results, and none of those interventions were confirmed through randomized controlled trials, the highest tier of evidence. In fact, one recent study of such a program found that it caused students worse depression, worse anxiety, worse relationships with their parents, and more difficulty managing their emotions.
Is it ethical for an educator to meddle in a child’s psyche without consent or formal training? Is the formation of a child’s character even the proper role of a school?
Our affective skills are complex capacities influenced by myriad factors: home life, family values, friends, cultural messaging, social-media influences, and genes. Even if we want schools to shape the character of our children, it’s unsurprising that schools can do little to influence the presence or absence of these skills in students.
There are a few things in education that we actually do know how to do pretty well that fall within the boundaries of a school’s role: teach the cognitive skills that Carnegie and ETS downplay. Calcified bureaucracies, recalcitrant unions, politicized colleges of education, and general ennui may stymie efforts to improve literacy or numeracy, but we know how to do it.
Mississippi reading scores are a recent proof point. With comprehensive teacher-training in the science of reading, the adoption of phonics-based curricula, and third-grade reading tests, the Magnolia State jumped from 49th to 21st in national rankings. Phonics or the dates of the Civil War are discernible, teachable, and measurable. But who’s to say if smelling a pine cone encourages curiosity or rolling in finger paint creativity? The ambiguity of affective goals will facilitate mediocrity.
What’s more, if we focus on academics, the aspect we know how to do, it’s likely that the desired affective skills will follow. The Carnegie and ETS paper laments college graduates who lack basic employment skills such as critical thinking or problem-solving. But decades of cognitive-science research demonstrates that these capacities depend on specific content knowledge, not transferable skills. An engineer can think critically about bridge design because they know much of physics and mathematics. A doctor’s grounding in anatomy, pharmacology, and biology allows them to problem-solve a patient case. Moreover, both of these fields depend on exacting, content-focused exams that confirm a prospective doctor’s or engineer’s grasp of the basics.
This initiative represents a deeper problem in American education, a recurrent desire to do seemingly everything except traditional academics. Because of their infrastructural role, this collaboration could systematize this error.
A Time article pitching the cut to academics argues that this fundamental shift could make “learning more relevant, more engaging, less opaque, and more equitable.” In reality, it would lower standards, decenter academic content, and leave students without the capacity to think critically, collaborate on complex projects, or creatively solve society’s problems. Those who give up academic content for wishy-washy goals such as problem-solving will get neither.