A Breath of Fresh Air

Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children's Zone appeared yesterday with Terri Gross on the always annoying, Fresh Air. Canada's group serves about 8,000 kids in a 97-block catchment in Harlem with a pre-K-through-high school program that is integrated with a wide-range of support services that kids in poverty typically need. At one point in the interview, Gross began to weigh-in on the question of whether HCZ's kids were being subjected to that boogeyman of the professional education lobby, the standardized test. In her breathy and breathless way, Gross bemoaned the way these tests stifle teacher and student creativity and get in the way of "real" learning. Don't you think it's awful, she asked, that teachers must "teach to the test?"

Canada paused and then said words to the effect, "I only wish they were teaching to the test. Right now, they don't seem be teaching much of anything." He then went on to make the case for standards and how the tests re-inject some rigor into urban public education. Marvelous. Hear it all here.