Contradictions of School Reform: Educational Costs of Standardized Testing.

Contradictions of School Reform: Educational Costs of Standardized Testing

by Linda M. McNeil Routledge. 281 pages. $19.99 (paper).

Test scores have become the defining motif of what passes for school reform these days. Across the country, students, teachers, and schools are being rewarded or punished based on standardized test scores. Whether you are smart, stupid, lazy, or hardworking is being reduced to how fast and how accurately you can darken the circles on a multiple-choice test.

This test-based reform model began about a decade ago with a call for standards, especially high standards (as if anyone were calling for low standards). This morphed into a reliance on standardized tests to determine if high standards were being met. Today, children are being flunked, denied access to a preferred program or school, or even refused a high school diploma on the basis of a single standardized test.

The obsession with test scores is not likely to go away any time soon, despite growing criticism from parents and teachers. Too many politicians, corporate leaders, and think tanks have embraced test-based reform as the only way to shake up our public schools and get more bang for the taxpayers' buck.

Currently, forty-nine states have state standards in core academic subjects, up from fourteen in 1996. (Iowa is the only holdout, prompting author and anti-testing advocate Alfie Kohn to comment, "Thank God for Iowa.") A growing number of states--twenty-seven at last count--are implementing high-stakes tests. In addition, many school districts are, on their own, adopting the same approach.

Does this mean, as many politicians would have you believe, that at last we are cracking down on unmotivated students, burnt-out teachers, and bureaucratic urban systems--and ensuring that all schools provide a minimal level of academic quality?

Unfortunately, no. As these three books underscore, relying on standardized tests to gauge academic quality has devastating consequences. It leads to a dumbed-down curriculum that values rote memorization over in-depth thinking, exacerbates inequities for low-income students and students of color, and undermines true accountability among schools, parents, and community.

There is growing evidence that the emphasis on standards and high-stakes tests is also a way to reassert official control over knowledge and to counter movements that demanded a more multicultural and diverse approach to what students should learn.

What's on these tests?

In some states, the content is a closely guarded secret. In other states, some of the questions are released publicly. In Massachusetts, which is more open than most, Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson took a look at the tenth-grade history test. His conclusion? "At best, it is silly. At worst, it is racist."

"The test, which focuses on `world' history, had fifty-seven items," he wrote in a column this June. "Of the fifty-seven items, about forty referred to Europe, from the Byzantine Empire to the Cold War. Five are questions about capitalism. Only twelve are about the rest of the world."

Test-based reform also edges out discussion about what is truly needed to ensure an excellent education for all students--that all schools receive adequate funding, that all students have a qualified teacher and access to a rigorous curriculum, and that classes be small enough to ensure individual attention and meaningful relationships between students and adults.

Most important, standardized tests will never answer the most fundamental question of all: What do our children need to learn to be leaders and informed citizens in a multicultural, ever-changing world?

But don't take my word for it. Start by reading Standardized Minds: The High Price of America's Testing Culture and What We Can Do to Change It, by Peter Sacks, a journalist based in Boise, Idaho, who writes in an accessible style.

Sacks provides a comprehensive overview, starting with the origins of standardized testing early in this century as a way to measure intelligence and provide data for theories about the intellectual superiority of Northern European whites. He also draws out the relationship between these earlier uses of standardized tests and today's misuses. "Polite society nowadays has its own `defectives' who don't measure up on standardized tests of so-called intelligence," he writes. "Once upon a time, they were Italian and Jewish immigrants. Now, they are the poor, the uneducated, African Americans, American Indians, people with learning `disabilities,' those for whom English is a second language, and others. In the past, the designated defectives were said to be genetically inferior. Now it is simply said that, according to this snapshot on this objective test, they lack requisite abilities, cognitive development, or aptitude. Curiously, the outcome has remained eerily similar in both eras, punishing those not born to the right parents and attending the right schools."

The strength of Sacks's book is that he provides the evidence to back up his critique. In chapter after chapter, he shows not only what is wrong with standardized tests, but also how what he calls the "accountability machine" has invaded classrooms across the country.

He takes on the SAT, which neither measures aptitude nor predicts how well one will do in college. Up to date on the latest in educational studies, he summarizes research on "multiple intelligences" (in other words, some people learn in linear, abstract ways, while others learn by seeing and doing; some people have exceptionally good linguistic skills, while others have physical or musical skills, and so forth). A chapter on "authentic assessment" suggests ways to evaluate how students will perform in the real world rather than on a paper-and-pencil multiple-choice test.

Sacks recognizes how standardized tests are used to track students and confer privilege, and thus he connects the current fascination with testing to the attack on affirmative action. But he stops short of a more thoroughgoing political critique and tends to blame test-based reform on an American fascination with numbers and efficiency.

Contradictions of School Rearm: Educational Costs of Standardized Testing, by Linda M. McNeil, is a bit slower going than Sacks's book but well worth the extra effort. It tackles head-on the issue of race--in particular, the myth that test-based reform is a way to institute higher standards for students of color.

Because urban systems routinely perform so poorly compared to more affluent suburban districts, some argue that statewide tests can be used to make sure urban teachers are setting high expectations for all students. It's an appealing argument. But it's hard to imagine how anyone could read McNeil's book and still hold on to the myth that standardized tests can drive true education reform.

McNeil is co-director of the Center for Education at Rice University and a professor of education. She was in the fortunate position to witness the trajectory of school reform in Houston, Texas, beginning with Ross Perot in the 1980s and on through the imposition of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) test during the current administration of George W. Bush.

Her analysis of what happened in Houston is of more than passing interest. First, Houston has the fifth largest public school system in the United States, and more than 150 languages are spoken by its students. Second, Texas is the second largest state, and its educational policies help set the national agenda. Finally, Texas has been cited, particularly by Bush backers, as an example of how high-stakes testing can act as a catalyst for education reform.

The beauty of McNeil's book is that she combines a solid theoretical grounding with a close-up of what actually happened in the Houston schools. That's a welcome change from education policy books that never bother to talk to the students and teachers saddled with implementing the reform du jour.

"Educational standardization harms teaching and learning and, over the long term, restratifies education by race and class," she writes.

She outlines the tension between public schools as a mechanism of sorting, tracking, and controlling students, and public schools as a battleground where grassroots communities, parents, and teachers struggle for a say in how and what children learn. She then shows how test-based reform centralizes power in the hands of the corporate and political elite--a particularly frightening development during this time of increasing corporate and conservative influence over education reform.

Some of the most compelling sections of McNeil's book are those that show how test-based reform has dumbed-down learning, especially for students of color. As every teacher knows, if you and your students are going to be evaluated on the basis of a single state test, the tendency will be to teach to that test. Because a principal's pay is determined, in part, by the school's performance on the TAAS test, some principals have blatantly turned their schools into test-prep centers. Publishers of test-prep materials will send consultants into schools, for a hefty price, "to help plan pep rallies, to `train' teachers to use the TAAS-prep kits, and to ease the substitution of their TAAS-prep materials for the curriculum in classrooms where teachers stubbornly resist."

One teacher told how she had spent considerable time and money assembling books of importance to Latino culture, and her students responded enthusiastically to her initiative. "She was dismayed to see, upon returning one day from lunch, that the books for her week's lessons had been set aside. In the center of her desk was a stack of test-prep booklets with a teacher's guide, and a note saying, `Use these instead of your regular curriculum until after the TAAS.' The TAAS test date was three months away."

Another teacher related that students were sent to test-taking pep rallies where they learned to chant, "Three in a row? No, No, No." Apparently, the purpose was to heighten student awareness that test-makers rarely allow three "B" answers in a row.

And this is what is passing for education reform in Texas. Next time someone starts spouting about the Texas educational miracle, give that person a copy of McNeil's book.

The final book under review, Will Standards Save Public Education?, is the briefest. It consists of a short essay by progressive educator Deborah Meier, principal of Mission Hill School in Boston, with responses from a variety of educators and policymakers (not all of whom agree with Meier).

The book's value is that it zeroes in on the connection between public education and democracy--a connection too often lost when schools are expected to merely churn out workers with the skills and attitudes desired by business.

In one of my favorite passages, Meier cuts through the rhetoric of the education crisis and points to a much more fundamental problem in society: the crisis in human relationships and the lack of any real sense of community and mutual responsibility. Schools, she argues, need to pay far more attention to this crisis.

Much of the book stays at the level of theory and ideology. And it may not be the best place to start if you're new to the debate on test-based reform. But it's a welcome affirmation that public schools are about more than teaching kids their letters and numbers. We must also develop the whole child and help students to be active citizens.

Barbara Miner is Managing Editor of Rethinking Schools (www.rethinking schools.org), an education rearm journal based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.