UNPLEASANT TRUTHS:

Standardized Testing: The General Patton of the Testing Wars (Nicholas Stix, 3/10/04, Mens News Daily)

For years, the American public has been force-fed a diet of test-bashing by the establishment media, the teachers’ unions, professors of teacher education and well-financed anti-testing organizations, in which test-bashers have twisted existing data, ignored contrary data, and fabricated data outright. So reports Richard Phelps in his brilliant, new book, Kill the Messenger: The War on Standardized Testing.

As Phelps tells it, Kill the Messenger “is as much about censorship and
professional arrogance as it is about testing.” The author contends that the
teachers and administrators who control the public education monopoly, and the teacher education professors who monopolize teacher credentialing, oppose standardized testing in order to shield themselves from public scrutiny and accountability. “… it is disturbing, because school administrators and education professors represent a group of public servants who should serve as models to our children. We pay them high salaries and give them very secure jobs. Then, we give them our children. Is just a little bit of external, objective evaluation of what they do with our money and our children really asking so much?”

Influential test-bashers include Walter Haney, Linda McNeil of Rice
University, Harvard’s Howard Gardner, University of California president Richard Atkinson, writers Alfie Kohn and Nicholas Lemann, the privately funded organization, Fair Test, and the taxpayer-funded organizations, CRESST at UCLA, and Boston College’s CSTEEP. (CRESST stands for “National Center for Research on Evaluations, Standards, and Student Testing”; CSTEEP stands for “the Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation, and Educational Policy.”)

Phelps argues persuasively that objective, external, standardized,
high-stakes testing is the best measure we have of how much students have learned, and how well teachers, curricula, and textbooks have done their respective jobs. The tests give us a tremendous amount of information on children’s academic strengths and weaknesses, so that we may help them improve. “Objective” is in contrast to classroom grades, which are increasingly subjective, politicized, and inflated. “External” means that school officials with a stake in the results do not control examination grading. “Standardized” means that a test “is given in identical form and at the same time to students in more than one school, and all the results are marked in the same way.” And “high stakes” means that test scores have consequences, so that the test serves as a powerful motivational tool. Alternatives such as classroom grades and “portfolios” of work lack the advantages of standardized testing, while being much more vulnerable to manipulation and cheating.

The real problem with testing is that it demonstrates two politically unacceptable things, that public schools aren't doing a very good job and that kids have a wide range of abilities. These both obviously threaten a vision of egalitarian progressivism.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 13, 2004 6:30 AM