New Year

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books. All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not. I hope you meet someone who thinks you're wonderful If you have, I hope you will cherish them at a new level. And don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself. Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine. Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in their decisions. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically (Not otherwise) impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with wise even though uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read scriptures in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever does not resonate with the Plan of Happiness, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. Finally, John Lennon said "Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears." It's all in the perspective. That's what I mean about forever, too. For any one of us our forever could end in an hour, or a hundred years from now. You never know for sure, so you'd better make every second count. And Abraham Lincoln said "And in the end it is not the years in your life that count, it's the life in your years.” Happy New Year friends!

Of High Stakes Examinations and its Victims

Measuring what and how well students learn is an important building block in the process of strengthening and improving outcomes in the education sector. Examinations, along with student grades can provide critical measures of students' skills, knowledge, and abilities, and ideally, attitudes. Therefore, examinations should be part of a system in which broad and evenhanded access to educational opportunity and progression is provided to all students. Examinations are among the most comprehensive and objective ways to measure student learning and performance. But, when examination results are used inappropriately or as a single measure of performance, they result in negative consequences. Ideally, examinations should be mandated by government to measure level of curriculum effectiveness and relevance, student performance and to hold individual schools and the education system as a whole accountable for that performance. If we measure what and how students learn, we have a chance to improve the weak areas. If we are measuring performance of the system then we also need to put in place measures for teaching and instruction, instructional leadership and supervision; and curriculum alignment to the needs of the country. Knowing if and what students are learning is important. Examination results give classroom teachers important information on how well individual students are learning and provide feedback to the teachers themselves on their pedagogical skills and curriculum materials. It is important to remember, however, in evaluation, no single tests is fit for all purposes. Indeed, examinations vary in their intended uses and in their ability to provide meaningful assessments and feedback on student learning. As such, while the goal of using large-scale examinations (such as the KCPE, KCSE) to measure and improve student and school system performance is laudable, but it is also critical that such examinations are sound, are scored properly, and are used appropriately. Thus we must devise ways to measure how the content that students are taught is useful. As it is, the only facet of the education sector examined in the Kenyan system is the learner. On this premise we assume that the student is solely responsible for the system results at the end of a course. When do we as a country evaluate the pedagogical practices in class? What is the efficacy of existing policies governing the sector? Don’t these facets require evaluation as well? Having students to take responsibility for the entire system is unfair to say the least. The first premise of Howard Garner’s Multiple Intelligence theory maintains that not all learners do well in cognitive examinations because their intelligence lies elsewhere. But most of the national exams are purely cognitive based. Secondly, many students are affected by examination anxiety or do not show their learning well on a standardized examination, resulting in inaccurately lower scores. You cannot test what has been learned in 4 years in 2 hours. In an unequal society such as ours, many students do not have a fair opportunity to learn the material on the examination because they attend poorly-funded schools with large class sizes, inadequate books, libraries, laboratories, computers and other facilities. These students are usually from low-income families, and many also suffer problems with housing, nutrition or health care. High-stakes examinations punish such children for things they cannot control. The situation is worse for students with learning disabilities who are examined the same way as regular students and fail examinations far more frequently than do mainstream students. The higher the stakes, the more schools focus instruction on the examinations that we commonly call drilling. Instruction then begins to look like the examinations. Reading for example is reduced to short passages followed by multiple-choice questions, a kind of "reading" that does not exist in the real world. Writing becomes the short incoherent essay that is useless except on standardized examinations. If you don’t believe me, pick up an ‘insha’ book for any form one child fresh from class 8, and you will get dizzy at the attempt to force ‘misemo’ in every sentence in an insha that cannot read, a result of the belief by teachers that the examiner with be looking for ‘tamathali za semi’. The upshot of this is that what is not examined often is not taught. Whole subjects may be dropped e.g. art or physical education is effectively eliminated in the actual curriculum because focus is placed on the subjects that are examined. Consequently topics or skills that cannot be examined with paper-and-pencil examinations – such as writing critical thinking and creativity are ignored. Again, this narrowing of curriculum and instruction happens most to students from poor families. In schools serving wealthier areas, teachers and parents make sure most students gain the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in college and life. They are taken to private schools, with small classes and closely monitored teachers and sometimes students are afforded extra tuition. Too often, students from poverty pockets get little more than examination coaching that does not adequately prepare them for further learning. In some schools, the library budget is spent on sample examination papers, and professional development is reduced to getting teachers to be better examination coaches. All this further limits educational opportunities for children from poor backgrounds. In such a scenario, teachers in such schools get discouraged. You cannot be teaching in schools always regarded as failures. Nobody wants to fail all the time. Good teachers are often discouraged, even disgusted, by the overemphasis on examinations. Many excellent teachers leave for other professions. It is ridiculous and absurd to believe that the "best and brightest” will want to become teachers when teaching is reduced to examination preparation and when schools are continually attacked by politicians, business leaders and the media for failures that are system-wide. When narrow examinations are used to hold schools accountable, teachers also leave low-performing schools where they are needed most. I think it is unfair to students that the system simply churns them out even when they have not been adequately educated. But again, if students do not have access to an adequate and equitable education, they end up being held accountable for the sector-wide performance while the education system is not. Teachers in Kenya simply lobby the government using a powerful union and get pay increments with no direct correlation to the effectiveness of their teaching. The government must take responsibility and be held accountable for providing a strong educational opportunity for all. The practice of high stakes testing in this country is an effort to treat teaching and learning in a simple and fair manner, but in a world where education is hugely complex with inequitable distribution of opportunity. If we are to increase the level of accountability for the sector, we need challenges from multiple viewpoints as to the costs and benefits for the children in our schools. Education requires decisions as to how children, teachers, and schools will be sustained, improved and promoted, but focus on high stakes examinations oversimplifies the decisions to be made. Today the education CS will preside over a live televised pompous ceremony called releasing KCSE exam results. That ritual will be the beginning of an upward trajectory for some children, and there will be celebrations across the country. It will also sound the death knell for most of the graduates who are victims of indiscriminate examination system. As we mourn or celebrate the results, we as a country should take time and reflect. We need be alive to the fact that most serious problem with high stakes exams such as the one whose results we expect today, is its insistence that education be evaluated in a narrow way. As an educator I know that every child can learn and learn extremely well, but not every child can necessarily do well in KCSE. When we represent children in percentages and means, we insulate ourselves against the miserable feeling of sending so many children into oblivion, because those are just statistics. When we stop transpose statistics to a personal level, we know these are the Wanyonyi’s, Habibas Kibets and Onyangos, and that is when we acutely suffer the system failure. Perhaps we need to examine consequences in real situations for real people affected, not just chunks of statistics. Currently, the examination system policies and practices fail to provide the mechanisms of review, meta-evaluation, and validation demanded by professional standards of education in the 21st century. I would love to celebrate a result from a system that gives a fair chance to all. I would love to celebrate good results from an objective assessment system. Unfortunately, I cannot. Not today, for I am yet to experience that system.