Stories of the Eight-Year Study: Reexamining Secondary Education in America

3. An Essential Faith:From Tests and Measurementto Appraisal and Evaluation

71 An Essential Faith 71 Chapter 3 An Essential Faith: From Tests and Measurement to Appraisal and Evaluation The first years of the eight-year experiment have been characterized by confident assurance and puzzled questions; clear thinking and confused fumbling; fresh, vigorous attack upon our problems; . . . ineffective, tradition-bound attempts to meet the challenge which our new freedom has brought. (Wilford M. Aikin, 1936)1 Introduction In the spring of 1934 school headmasters, commission staff, and teachers were disturbed with the direction the experiment seemed to be taking. Frustrated with the seemingly ineffective attempts to reframe their school programs—the confused fumbling—the principals lashed out at one of the few areas where decisions had been made: the selection of tests for college admissions. As Ralph Tyler recalled, “The thing was about to go haywire.”2 Perhaps it had. In late April 1934, Herbert Smith received a letter from Wilford Aikin informing him that he had “no moral right to upset the machinery for managing the experiment right at the beginning.”3 At the same time, the New York Times wrote to Smith requesting the results of “the college entrance experiment,” inquiring how the schools had met the challenge of admissions.4 The Times had announced the project a year before and wanted to know what teaching methods had been employed in the schools. Ironically, as reporters pressed for results of the Eight-Year Study after merely one year, the participants were still attempting to determine the project’s focus and direction. Three years had passed since the initial planning session, and the most definite statement was that the school faculties did not want to be part of a Carnegie research program. 72 Stories of the Eight-Year Study Even with the initial tradition-bound efforts, a spirit of independence and open inquiry prevailed among the cooperating school faculties , many of whom firmly embraced school experimentation. Also, the group seemed to be moving toward a yet-to-be-articulated conviction : responsibility for educational reform necessarily rests with school faculties and staff. This faith in experimentation and belief in teachers would soon be expressed in what could be interpreted as outright defiance toward leaders in the field of tests and measurements. The spokesperson was a young educator who, just a few years before, had traveled the back roads of North Carolina offering extension courses to teachers. In the process he had come to appreciate their challenges and needs. The Eight-Year Study would avoid another uprising, and much of the credit belongs to this spokesperson, Ralph Tyler, who joined the Commission staff later that summer. The 1934 George School Conference: “A Gathering of Craftspersons” During the spring revolt, Herb Smith’s principals’ caucus feared that the Aikin Commission’s Committee on Tests and Records, headed by Eugene Smith, would emerge as an accrediting agency, standing between their high schools and the colleges. The caucus drafted a document telling the Aikin Commission’s Directing Committee that the schools would accept no prescribed testing program and that teachers would be responsible for researching school practice, otherwise “the spark of life will go out unless teachers feel that they are enlisted in research. Such a program as has been proposed will make of them merely clerical assistants.”5 The warning of Herb Smith and the principals was heeded when for six days in June 1934 cooperating teachers, principals, and Commission staff came together for the George School Conference, the second annual meeting of the Eight-Year Study. Unlike the earlier gathering at Bennington College, where Aikin Commission and Carnegie Foundation staff presented keynote addresses describing the progress of the experiment to a small group of principals, teachers, and college administrators , the George School meeting was open to all participating high school teachers. One can only imagine the excitement at the first keynote session to the ever-present question, “What is all this about?” Obviously trying to respond to concerns of the school faculties, Aikin described the current direction of the “curriculum study,” as the EightYear Study was called at this time. After the opening session, no formal conference papers were presented; instead, the program was drawn from responses to a questionnaire that had been sent to principals two 73 An Essential Faith months earlier requesting information from both teachers and students about their problems and successes to date. Topics were assigned to individual school faculties, and twenty-five of...