From a recent Dilbert comic:
Dilbert (to his boss with the two stacks of pointy black hair): “We added a new performance test, but learned that the test itself is flawed. Now our product fails our own tests and our customers are asking to see the test results. Do I have permission to fake the data?”
Boss: “I didn’t even know data could be real.”
So what this says to me is that, upon my own reflection after over three decades in the field, I just wonder how people could have accepted the grossly flawed data gathered daily in American foreign language classrooms, from quizzes to big exams like the A.P. Exam. I mean, if the kids aren’t into it, if the test is, at best, nothing than intellectual gymnastics to them and, at worst, something they just don’t care about, then how could any data gathered be accurate?
The four percenters have, oddly, held it all together. By putting up with outmoded ways of teaching for so long, doing the memorization required to gain the teacher’s favor and earn the A while become a sort of young colleague to the teacher who gives the teacher a sort of false belief that what they are doing is ok, when it is quicksand, they have given credibility to the same system that has left 96% of their classmates in the dust thinking that they can’t learn a language.
But the rot, the destruction from the inside, of that system is about to cause total collapse of the haystack, and the four percenters won’t be able to work their magic, to prop up the rotten haystack, any longer. It’s over. People are waking up to the fact that they weren’t bad at languages in high school and college because they “weren’t good at it” but because of the way it was taught to them.
In the light of that fact, administrators can no longer sit back and hope that everything in their departments will work out. Everything will not work out. Refusing to choose in favor of aggressive comprehensible input in their classes will cost some people their jobs in the next few years. It’s decision time. Finally.