America’s obsession with testing our children every year on the national or state levels brings Einstein’s words on insanity to life: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The United States has been hyper-testing our children for twelve years (the start of No Child Left Behind was in 2002) and we keep getting the same results in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA): steady average in reading and science and below average in math. Although our scores have remained stagnant, “our ranking,” according to the National Center for Education Statistics, “is slipping because a lot of these other countries are improving.”
What do the top scorers such as Finland do with respect to testing? They test a child only once during their K-12 experience. The Finnish have a word for our testing obsession: hullu (insane or crazy). I argue that we have subscribed to “hullu-plus” over the last twelve years.
While other countries have increased their PISA results, the only results with any significant increase that the United States is experiencing are in cheating scandals. Simply pick up any reputable American newspaper during the past week and you will see headlines stating “Cheating Probe Roils Philadelphia School System” and “Ohio School District Hit by Cheating Allegations.” With the jobs of teachers and administrators increasingly being tied to testing scores, do you think that instances of cheating will go up or down?
A main reason we keep testing is not for of any educational, logical or sane reason but for the power of certain lobbies. In my state of Connecticut, for instance, the number one spender on lobbying is a corporate education reform group called A Better Connecticut. While A Better Connecticut spent $2.3 million in 2013, the combined total spent by all the lobbying groups on both sides of the gun policy debate was $556,149 (the year immediately following the Sandy Hook tragedy). Follow the money and an understanding of why we keep testing our children “over and over again and expecting different results” becomes perversely clear. While I believe that the Common Core State Standards are necessary in the United States for many reasons (i.e., spend one afternoon in a suburban classroom and the next in an urban schoolroom and you will see at least 18-40 reasons sitting in the seats), the hyper-testing that began with No Child Left Behind should be abandoned because it is at its best “stagnating” the education of our children while inflating the bottom lines of corporate educators (i.e., businesses that make money off of testing and charter schools, which are privately run but publicly funded).
I recommend a middle ground between what we are doing now with testing and what Finland does. My suggestion is to test only in 5th, 8th and 12th grades. These are key transition years in educational development and our emphasis should be on testing how well the system of education works for our children and not how well our children work for the system. In other words, by testing every year we have placed the pressure of evaluating our educational system on our children and not on the system we created. Our country’s educators are focused on teaching to their respective yearly test (something they do not want to do but have to because of our hyper-testing obsession) and not to any broader or deeper educational goals. Somewhere over the last two decades in the United States we conflated testing with educating to the point where we have promoted teaching (to the test) over learning in our classrooms.
The horrific case outlined in many New York papers of four year-old Myls Dobson’s death by his “caregiver” of three weeks caused me not only to ask “why” but to dive deeper into recent research into the difference between compassion and empathy. When I read the word “caregiver” for the person who abused Myls, I couldn’t help but think of some of our society’s real caregivers such as nurses, paramedics and social workers; while most people simply read about traumatic stories, they live the stories. They live with addressing traumatic incidents everyday at such an intense level that psychologists have coined the term “compassion fatigue” (a.k.a. secondary traumatic stress) to explain how and why some nurses and social workers go through “a unique form of burnout.” Recent research in the field of neuroscience, however, indicates that the term is a misnomer that conflates compassion with empathy. In short, there is a distinct difference between compassion and empathy and defining compassion without empathy as part of its definition could lead to a better understanding of “burnout” and more effective ways of avoiding it.
Where empathy is about stepping into the shoes of another to understand and share their feelings, compassion is about acquiring a 360 degrees understanding of the suffering or problem that a person is experiencing. Empathy is emotionally absorbing the feelings of another and, in contrast, compassion is holistically learning about their problem and taking action to resolve it. The distinction is important for any discussion about the “unique burnout” of caretakers. Emotionally absorbing another’s feelings, which empathy entails, is physically draining and can make you feel metaphorically stuck in quicksand. Compassion, on the other hand, keeps the emotional quicksand at a distance by using a cognitive understanding of a person’s suffering when attempting to alleviate the pain: understanding without absorbing.
Tania Singer, a director of neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Lepzig, has used MRI scanners to show that compassion and empathy “are two different phenomena associated with different brain activity patterns.” Dr. Singer saw different regions of the brain “light up” on people whether they were thinking empathically or compassionately. When thinking compassionately, brain “areas associated with romantic love or reward, such as the nucleus accumbens and ventral striatum, were activated.” Compassion’s strength as a power source for helping others is that it is not only derived from the same areas of our brain as love but it is centrally focused on the concern and care of others. When empathy is used as the source for helping another, the central motivation is to alleviate your own pain and stress. And that egocentric motivation is, I believe, one of the keys for understanding why burnout occurs much easier when caregivers are thinking empathically. If you are thinking and trying hard to alleviate your own pain, you tend to fall deeper into the pain. An easier way to think of this is: try hard to not think of something, say a black dog. How did you do? Psychologists call this the “ironic process of mental control.” It is the caregiver’s emotional quicksand. The distinction between compassion and empathy may be, according to Dr. Singer’s work, hardwired in the brain. There needs to be more research and discussion regarding the differences between compassion and empathy but if caregivers learn how to harness the power of compassion, they will—ironically—help themselves while helping others.
Image: FMRI scan during working memory tasks, by John Graner, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center
Two scientific discoveries this year literally and figuratively “upend” the way we study our universe and our understanding of the brain. Scientists at the South Pole observatory, the IceCube Lab (see photo below), have discovered 28 new “ghostlike particles,” called astrophysical neutrinos, which come from very distant parts of our galaxy and beyond (millions and even billions of years from Earth). Neutrinos are subatomic particles that 
rarely interact with the rest of the universe because they are nearly massless (it takes a large amount of material such as giant ice sheets to discover them through their interaction with other matter). The central paradox of this discovery is that the telescope (a.k.a. particle detector) is looking at least one mile into the Antarctic ice instead of out into space. Physics World, the British magazine, awarded the discovery their 2013 Breakthrough of the Year and stated that it is “a remarkable achievement that gives astronomers a completely new way of studying the cosmos.” In short, by innovatively examining Earth, scientists are gaining a deeper understanding about space. A broader societal lesson, for me, of IceCube is that we sometimes overlook the fact that we can more effectively achieve our goals through counterintuitive approaches.
The other “upending” idea of 2013 has come from the field of neuropsychology and has turned our understanding of how the brain works from left/right to top-down. The popular notion that the brain is divided into left and right hemispheres has been debunked by Stephen M. Kosslyn and G. Wayne Miller in their new book “Top Brain, Bottom Brain: Surprising Insights Into How You Think.” Kosslyn and Miller clearly 
demonstrate that the near universal story about the left (analytical and logical) and right (artistic and intuitive) hemispheres of the brain is not based in science. Rather, Kosslyn and Miller use decades of peer reviewed neuroscience research to show that the top and bottom parts of the brain work as a “single interactive system.” They call their approach “the theory of cognitive modes” and it demonstrates that there is no “cerebral tug of war” between one-side of the brain and the other. While the “top brain” consists of the entire parietal lobe and the top portion of the frontal lobe, the “bottom brain” is made up of the remainder of the frontal lobe and all of the occipital and temporal lobes (see illustration). In sum, the traditional paradigm of the way we understood how the brain learns has been replaced by an interdependent model of cognition that is more scientifically robust. Our educational system should be a place where such scientific research has an immediate societal effect. If we have a better understanding of how the brain learns, we can construct more efficient and effective curricula for our children.
The 28 neutrinos discovery and the development of the top-bottom brain map help us to better understand our world from the outside in and from the inside out. Both discoveries provide us with “more whys” and help us on our quest to be “more wise.”
America’s socioeconomic strength and health are why we would be wise to pay more attention to the headlines about the lack of trust in the U.S. than to the alarmist headlines about the international education scores known as PISA (Program for International Student Assessment). Let’s start with the 2012 PISA scores that were just released in early December. A 3 December 2013 Wall Street Journal article titled “Students Slip in Global Tests” states that American 15-year-olds “fell further in the rankings, reviving a debate about America’s ability to compete in the global economy.” Unfortunately, American students have never been the top scorers since international tests began in the mid-1960s (see Diane Ravitch’s National Standards in American Education: A Citizen’s Guide for an overview of international tests). Fortunately, while the U.S. educational system does not produce the best test takers in the world, the system has produced citizens with the creativity and inventiveness to become the world’s leading entrepreneurs and innovators when seen through traditional economic statistics and patents granted. As a matter of fact, in a widely cited 2007 article titled “Are International Tests Worth Anything?” Keith Baker clearly shows that “the higher a nation’s test score 40 years ago, the worse its economic performance” has been in terms of per capita gross domestic product. He counter-intuitively demonstrates that economic strength is sacrificed when a country is focused on achieving the world’s top test scores. Baker concludes his argument by stating:
“a certain level of educational attainment, as reflected in test scores, provides a platform for launching national success, but once that platform is reached, other factors become more important than further gains in test scores. Indeed, once the platform is reached, it may be bad policy to pursue further gains in test scores because focusing on the scores diverts attention, effort, and resources away from other factors that are important determinants of national success.”
Paul Tough (in his book How Children Succeed) and others have highlighted grit, curiosity, creativity and character as the “other factors that are important determinants” of success. In short, the PISA rankings and “America’s ability to compete in the global economy” have nothing to do with each other.
A factor that does play a role in America’s economic vitality is highlighted in the 7 December 2013 article “Why Americans are so Angry” of The Economist: trust. Although the author convincingly shows that the United States is not yet a “low-trust” country, the article outlines how America’s political and racial divisiveness are moving it solidly in that direction. While many scholars such as Robert Putnam and Francis Fukuyama have explained the important role that trust or “social capital” plays in the political and socioeconomic development of a country, Paul Zak has recently shown in The Moral Molecule how the economics of a country are literally intertwined with the biology of trust of its people. Without trust, civil society withers and without civil society, a country’s political and socioeconomic health deteriorates. America the melting pot, where people were fused together to make this country stronger, is slowly shape shifting into something much more divisive and cold—an ice tray—which would make our country more fragile and breakable.
What is the “loom” (threat) of today’s weave and what is its “thread” of hope? While the “loom” of today’s weave is that trust between Americans may be slipping, an educational system that provides a core level of academic achievement while developing character, creativity, curiosity and grit in every student can act as the “thread” that unites us in our own success.
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