High-stakes tests: The dog ate our
common sense
By Marion Brady
*May 27, 2003
'You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the
time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."
Abraham Lincoln knew what he was talking about. Proof can be found in Arizona,
California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts,
Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas.
It can probably be found elsewhere, too, but those are places where people have
gone to the trouble of organizing themselves and creating Internet sites to
declare their resistance to being conned.
The people in Florida identify themselves as FCAR -- Florida Coalition for
Assessment Reform. In Ohio, they call themselves Parents Against Unfair
Proficiency Testing. Those in Nevada are Citizens For Alternatives to
Standardized Test Abuse. In Louisiana, it's Parents For Educational Justice.
Massachusetts has several groups, one of which is Student Coalition for
Alternatives to MCAS (better known by its acronym SCAM. The M stands for
"Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System").
More than 50 Internet sites for organizations opposed to high-stakes testing are
listed on the Internet. The members of these organizations have listened to the
political blather about educational "accountability" coming from Washington and
state capitals, and they don't like what they hear -- evidence of a profound
disrespect for the young, and ignorance of the complexity of educating. They're
fighting the claim that one-size-fits-all, high-stakes, one-shot,
machine-graded, standardized tests say something useful about kids, teachers and
schools.
The ranks of those who refuse to be taken in by stump-speech and bumper-sticker
political rhetoric about education are growing. When critical voting mass has
been reached, it should be entertaining to watch politicians scramble for
face-saving ways to distance themselves from many of the policies they earlier
helped put into place.
Opponents fight the blight, but they're discouraged by the fact that so many
otherwise smart people seem not to realize they're being taken for a ride. And
they're discouraged because so many Americans buy syndicated columnist George
Will's contention that teachers resist high-stakes testing simply because
they're "accountability averse."
There are at least a half-dozen powerful reasons why parents, grandparents and
all others who care about kids and the future of America should join the
anti-high-stakes-testing movement. Here, in simple language, is a six-step
explanation of one of those reasons:
· The world changes. Nonstop.
· To survive, it's necessary to control and adapt to change.
· To control and adapt, new knowledge must be created.
· Constructing new knowledge requires thinking in complicated ways --
remembering, categorizing, drawing inferences, generating hypotheses,
generalizing, seeing relationships in seemingly unrelated aspects of reality,
making value judgments.
· Of these seven thought processes, only one version of one of them is simple
enough for a machine-graded test to measure with precision: remembering
secondhand information.
· Testing one thought process while neglecting six others is stupid.
Making life-altering decisions about students, teachers, administrators,
schools, school systems and whole states based on a multiple-choice test score
is stupider still.
(Unless, of course, the point of it all is to discredit public schooling so
thoroughly the public will demand that responsibility for educating the young be
handed over to Edison, Chancellor, and other corporate interests. If that's the
aim, then the plan is on track and working beautifully. The head of Maine's
public education system estimates that, in seven years, using federal criteria,
every school in Maine will be classified as failing.)
For the past dozen years, education "reform" has been in the hands of people in
Washington and state capitals who know so little about education they're not
even embarrassed by the mess they've made of it. They point proudly to
improvements in test scores, as if rising test scores meant rising student
achievement.
Decades from now, if histories are still being written, historians telling the
story of America around the turn of the 21st century will write a page or two
about the standardized-testing fad and the billions of dollars of tax money
shipped off to testing companies in the name of education reform. They'll
subtitle it "The Dumbing Down of America."
If the present trend in education bothers you, talk about it with the most
influential people you know. And next election, give local, state and national
candidates that sequence of six numbered questions above and ask them where they
stand.
*Originally published in the Orlando Sentinel. Published here by
permission of the author.
