Sue Atkinson
Baxter
The last week of February, two members of the Iowa State Board of Education, Charlie Edwards and Mary Ellen Miller, wrote an op-ed for the Des Moines Register explaining the reason behind a coming new state assessment test. Their explanation for the need was outdated Iowa Assessment tests remaining reliant on memorization rather than applied concepts, a problem I have been discussing for some time now. In a private email exchange with Iowa Education Director Brad Buck the same week, he also acknowledged to me that Iowa education must change from the memorization it has been using.
Memorization is an addiction for educators because they have been accustomed to getting the content of the Iowa Assessments so they would know what information to have students memorize in order to appear to be good. Memorization fails to develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills necessary for the real world and competition from all those educated in systems based on applied concepts rather than memorization. The NAEP assessments show Iowa 4th-graders to still be at the same level of proficiency as they were in 1992, and the reason is the addiction of Iowa educators to memorization. Even when Iowa educators say they support the Common Core (which is based on concepts), they continue to use memorization in elementary, rationalizing it in a number of ways.
When No Child Left Behind intervened in 2001, memorization-addicted Iowa educators screamed loudly, and became the last state to grudgingly say they would make the change to concepts. They were addicts in denial, insisting they had no problem, and then pointing fingers everywhere else (as Iowa educators do when they blame students, parents, and funding) to avoid accountability. The next stage of this is acknowledging there might be a problem. The third stage would be the purchase of new reading programs that follow the Common Core of no memorization, but then Iowa schools are adding memorization at the elementary level, indicating they have not really embraced the change. Addicts do this when they finally admit that “maybe” they need to make a change, but the necessary amount of effort to actually make the change is not made.
Iowa’s official state proficiency standard remains at the 41st NPR rather than the grade level 65th NPR, an indication too few Iowa educators are ready for the true commitment, and they are behaving as enablers to avoid committing to change.