School Testing
In the article What’s Wrong with Teaching to the Test?, author Dave Posner argues that the struggle for improving public education by means of standardized testing is a quixotic quest. The mighty and well-intentioned of society tilt at the windmills of teacher professionalism and student performance, while the greater good of preparing the next generation for thriving in an enormously complex world is left wanting.
My reaction to this article is to recall outspoken musician Frank Zappa’s proposal to overhaul the legal system. His solution was to put the lawyers under oath in the courtroom, with treble penalties for any lies they might tell in the process of adjudicating cases they bring before the bar. To borrow a phrase, it’s the accountability, stupid. The age-old criticism of cultural and social biases of test preparers harming the chances of certain students is alone enough to cast a long shadow over the validity of testing as the measure of success. While the oversight of areas like test wording does attempt to limit inherent bias, the larger question must be how far up the ladder accountability goes. From my vantage point, the answers are not encouraging.
It’s official. The country has adopted the Texas model of minding curriculum standards through high-stakes testing, mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act. Ironically, President Bush is taking credit for implementing a plan that originated with family nemesis H. Ross Perot in the mid 1980s. That a man of high office, who freely admits being an infrequent reader of the news, wants proof that students are learning is emblematic of where we are headed with NCLB. The positive incentives promised to high performing schools and districts—mainly, more money—will evaporate under the burden of skyrocketing deficits. Only the negative incentives of threatening takeover and closure remain. It has already happened in California. One can only guess at the motives of those who have set up so many public institutions for certain failure. However, the majority holding power at the federal level today have already made clear their philosophy that government is bad, and will endeavor to reinforce this creed by giving us bad government for the foreseeable future.
In the 1985 Kurt Vonnegut novel Galapagos, the descendants of the only survivors of a worldwide plague that eradicates the human race devolve over a million years into seafaring creatures that resemble seals. I think Posner is being only slightly facetious when he postulates a parallel fate for our progeny if we continue on the course we have plotted by using testing as the ultimate yardstick of academic achievement. Inculcating students with the notion that success is little more than pushing the right levers, that every problem requires only a minute of analysis from initial encounter to solution, trashes every attempt to draw out higher order processes of application, perspective and self-adjustment from them. We will instead reduce the vast lot to the level of robots, who will then find themselves, at best, in the service of the machines we employ to automate our lives, or worse, in line for complete replacement.