Whither Creativity?

By Michael Diedrich, Policy Associate, January 2, 2012 at 8:30 am

A couple weeks back, Education Week posted an article rounding up several studies and discussions on creativity that came out during 2011. It raises several interesting points that should give pause to many of us who care about closing the achievement gap and preparing all students for success in the future.

Even those of us (like me) who are critical of an over-reliance on test scores in evaluating achievement tend to fall into certain assumptions about the achievement gap. First, the very term “achievement gap” suggests that there is some disparity in academic performance that is at least theoretically measurable. The most common way of “visualizing” the gap is to look at the difference in test scores between groups.

Indeed, it is difficult (at least for me) to construct a sense of the achievement gap independent of this sort of measurement-centered understanding. If there's no way for me to measure the attribute in question, how can there be a gap?

This creates problems when we start talking about areas like creativity. One point raised by several of the experts in the EdWeek article is that creativity is very difficult to measure with any precision and accuracy. As such, it is very difficult to assess the “size of the gap” (for lack of a better term) in creativity across different groups today.

Creativity, however, is already critical to professional success in many fields in the United States today, and it will only become more important as we move further away from an industrial/manufacturing economy. The ability to tackle new problems or to apply knowledge and skills from one domain to a seemingly unrelated one is part of what will keep the United States competitive in the coming decades.

These abilities, however, as well as the capacities for original composition and innovation are nowhere to be found in the tests we currently use to define the achievement gap. As we've seen, the skills we test are the skills that get taught (or at least that get the most emphasis). It's time for progressives to push for a broadening of our conception of the goals of schooling to include creativity.

Posted in Education | Related Topics: K-12 education  Achievement Gap  NCLB