Ed.M.

It has been busy. Very busy. A little over a week ago I graduated once more from a college here in New York with a second masters degree in Instructional Technology. This one was not an M.A. like the first one from that institution, but an Ed.M. which is the pit stop to the doctoratal degree I hope to be getting in a few years. I'm enjoying the process quite a bit, and not the goal at all. Learning is an exciting thing, and in a formal setting where one can find a structure and a community it is all the more rewarding, and I will miss that quite a bit. I do not want the process to end.

Over the past year or so I came to the conclusion that the most significant use of technology in education was something we ignore and tend to wish away. It is like a corpse rotting at the dinner table or a particularly well-dressed but flatulent and foul guest who insists on being at every party as a matter of right. That technology is testing. Every kid is getting tested and tested and tested. There is no getting around it. Bush likes it. Bloomberg likes it. The Board of Trustees where I work likes it. It is, it would seem, the solution to every problem. Just like I guess they thought napalm was in the Vietnam War. It has, I'm afraid, about the same result.

When you get a college degree of any kind you sort of get the impression that your SAT scores and the like are just a useless rite of passage or a peverse form of creating scarcity. "Tests" don't really matter as much as the power of your own ideas, the willingness to argue from evidence, to debate respectfully, work hard, accept your role as an apprentice and to take ownership of the process yourself. Tests of the standardized ilk mean nothing, so why do we value them so much? What do they prove? As we test more and more with our #2 pencils and computer-readable forms we are using a particular technological solution that solves nothing. I will be reading alot of Debbie Meier books over the next few weeks, and hope that I can find a way to discuss this fetish in a hopeful manner.