Listening to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, one would think that American schools are bastions of the hard left, education factories that churn out soft-headed liberal ideologues.\u00a0 But in Standardized Education: Moving America to the Right<\/em>, Arthur Lieber makes precisely the opposite argument.\u00a0 Lieber believes that the country\u2019s recent shift to the right can be traced directly to our school\u2019s infatuation with standardized tests and the right wing values they encompass.<\/p>\n

There are two central ideas in Standardized Education<\/em> that serve as bookends of sorts for Lieber\u2019s argument–he introduces them early on and then returns to them in a more concrete way in the third and final section of the book.\u00a0 First, he believes that one of the most important jobs of a school is the teaching and learning of empathy, the ability to put yourself in someone else\u2019s shoes.\u00a0 Second, Lieber asserts that schools must teach critical thinking skills\u2014simply put, students should be sophisticated enough to know when information is misleading so that they can make wise choices and become responsible, active citizens.\u00a0 These two values (empathy and critical thinking) form the core of Lieber\u2019s educational philosophy.<\/p>\n

The problem with the values of empathy and critical thinking, of course, is that they are not easy to quantify–they are not going to show up with a percentile next to them on the next standardized test. Though it would be lovely to be able to brag that your son or daughter is in the 89^{th<\/sup> percentile for \u201cbs detection,\u201d critical thinking skills are slippery and do not lend themselves to objective measurement.\u00a0 But that does not mean they should be dismissed.\u00a0 Indeed, in the last section of the book Lieber describes how the values of empathy and critical thinking could contribute to the development of a more just, progressive society.\u00a0 He also goes a step further and describes what this would look like in the classroom.\u00a0 Teachers have to model empathy and critical thinking, and students have to be offered opportunities to get out of the classroom and into the real world.\u00a0 It won\u2019t be easy, especially in an era of budget cuts and standardization, for students to be given authentic experiential learning opportunities.\u00a0 But even though it can be a tough sell in today\u2019s educational environment, Lieber is very persuasive that it\u2019s a goal worth pursuing.<\/p>\n}

Though Standardized Education <\/em>is not a lengthy book, it is a nuanced one that avoids some of the good versus evil dichotomies that you so often find in other education books.\u00a0 The book\u2019s treatment of teachers offers an excellent example of this.\u00a0 Too often in books about the American educational system teachers are portrayed as either heroic victims of a dysfunctional system or, in the other extreme, as lazy incompetents biding their time until their cushy pension comes due.\u00a0 For Lieber, though, teachers are just human beings.\u00a0 Some are poor teachers, teachers who care only about their test scores and have forgotten what it was like to be a student stuck in a classroom filling in mindless worksheets.\u00a0 Others are creative, bright individuals who manage despite considerable odds to make their classroom a place for high energy learning.\u00a0 In Lieber\u2019s view, teachers are human beings who have very difficult jobs to do, and some of them have the grace and stamina to do it well, while others do not.<\/p>\n

Similarly, Lieber looks upon both Democrats and Republicans with a critical eye in Standardized Education<\/em>.\u00a0 Make no mistake about it, Lieber is arguing for an educational system that imbues its students with more progressive values, but he is quick to point out that Democrats as well as Republicans are standing in the way of that happening because of the bipartisan embrace of the almighty standardized tests.\u00a0 Standardized tests, as evidenced by Bush\u2019s No Child Left Behind<\/em> program and Obama\u2019s Race to the Top<\/em>, are the true villains of Lieber\u2019s book.\u00a0 The problem with standardized tests, he asserts, is that they value number-crunching over the living, breathing students in the classroom, and they embrace a conservative value of competition as the key barometer to a person\u2019s value as a human being.\u00a0 \u00a0Standardized tests, then, both reflect and reinforce a morally bankrupt Republican ethos:\u00a0 Just as conservative Republicanism supports a status quo in which competition allows only for the survival of the fittest (empathy and compassion be damned) so too does an educational climate where standardized tests reign supreme. Taken as a whole, Standardized Education<\/em> is a meditation on how the American educational system went wrong, but it is also a call to action, a road map for how to transform American schools into places where democratic, progressive values are embraced.<\/p>\n

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