Power, Politics, and High-Stakes Testing: Part 2

Note: This is the conclusion of a two-part post.

Part 2: Rhetoric and Political Power

Strip away the rhetoric used to describe high-stakes testing as a mechanism for school reform and the raw goals of such testing are revealed to be political power and ideological dominance. Authors Madaus, Russell, and Higgins (2009) comment that “high-stakes tests empower policymakers, who control the content and form of the test, to shape what and how teachers teach and students learn” (p. 101). The real bullies in education aren’t on the playground but in Congress, the statehouses, and similar seats of political and bureaucratic power.

The maxim that what gets tested is what gets taught is reified in a narrowing of the school curriculum in proportion to the amount of testing imposed on schools by federal and state mandates. High-stakes tests require an extraordinary, exclusionary focus if schools are to ensure their students’ success—not in terms of actual learning but rather in test-taking. To focus so much time on one subject, or narrow band of subjects, means that other subjects are pushed to the periphery because schools lack the capacity (time and money) to expand the school day in order to accommodate this added focus and still have sufficient time for other subjects.

One recent nationwide indicator is the Department of Education report, Arts Education in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools 1999 – 2000 and 2009 – 10 (Parsad, Spiegelman, and Coopersmith 2012). This is the decade of NCLB and it echoes still and, in fact, even more loudly. Comparing arts education availability from studies a decade apart, researchers found that visual arts instruction in elementary schools had declined from 87 percent to 83 percent, dance from 20 percent to 3 percent, and drama/theater from 20 percent to 4 percent (p. 5). Secondary school arts fared similarly: visual arts down from 93 percent to 89 percent, dance from 14 percent to 12 percent, and drama/theater from 48 percent to 45 percent (p. 9). Music across the decade stayed roughly the same at both levels.

Arts organizations decry the trend away from arts education, which has proven links to higher-level thinking and the advancement of learning in other subjects. CCSS skews learning, arguably as much as or more than previous standards movements because the Common Core is linked to and advanced by narrow standardized testing.

While political rhetoric flips logic on its head to assert that high-stakes testing leads to school improvement and higher student achievement, the facts are starkly at odds with this idea. Funding testing at the federal and state levels is a multimillion-dollar enterprise that shunts much-needed money into the corporate coffers of test developers, producers, and scorers and away from districts and schools, where it could be better used to improve instruction. Mandatory testing, which is sold to the uninformed public as good policy for schools and students, is not about education but competition—and a fundamental remaking of public education into a narrowly defined, corporatized, politicized form that is anything but “public” in a positive sense.

References

Center for the Study of Mathematics Curriculum. (2004). The Committee of Ten. Columbia, Mo.: Author.

Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education. (1918). Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, Bulletin, 1918, No. 35. Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education.

Madaus, G.F.; M.K. Russell; and J. Higgins.  (2009). The Paradoxes of High Stakes Testing: How They Affect Students, Their Parents, Teachers, Principals, Schools, and Society. Charlotte, N.C.: Information Age.

National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983, April). A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Parsad, Basmat; Maura Spiegelman; and Jared Coopersmith. (2012). Arts Education in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools 1999 – 2000 and 2009 – 10. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education.

States’ Impact on Federal Education Policy Project (SIFEPP). (2009). Federal Education Policy and the States, 1945 – 2009: A Brief Synopsis. Albany: New York State Archives. http://www.archives.nysed.gov

Power, Politics, and High-Stakes Testing: Part 1

Note: This is a two-part post. References can be found at the conclusion of Part 2.

Part 1: Evolving Standards and Curriculum Development

Standards movements have cycled through schools and statehouses regularly, the latest in the succession often repudiating its predecessor. In 1894, to pick an arbitrary starting point, the Committee of Ten, a group of well-known scholars, called for a rigorous academic curriculum for all high school students, regardless of whether the students were college bound. This overturned a prior focus, namely that high schools were specifically for the college bound (Center for the Study of Mathematics Curriculum 2004). The Progressives came along twenty years later in the form of a commission appointed by the National Education Association, which largely repudiated the Committee of Ten’s work and issued its own “Cardinal Principles” (Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education 1918). And so it has gone across the decades.

U.S. reaction to the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, for instance, triggered a new look at the school curriculum and flipped the prevailing focus on low-achieving students to concentrate on the needs of above-average students in order to win the space race. But something new happened this time: The fix came not from educators but from politicos—an amalgam of legislators and bureaucrats at federal and state levels. This was an era when an already slightly expanding role of the federal government in education was further enlarged. An example is the hurriedly passed National Defense Education Act (NDEA) in 1958, which funneled unprecedented funds into public education (SIFEPP 2009). In the 1960s Johnson’s Great Society initiative turned the focus back toward the underserved and gave us the first incarnation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).

Some standards movements have been helpful, others harmful to schools and students. But virtually all such movements in the last seventy years or so have begun from a premise that schools and educators are on the wrong track and so politicians, policy makers, and pundits need to step in and set things right. A stunningly ill-considered product of this thinking was the 1983 publication, A Nation at Risk, with its infamous declaration that the nation was facing a “rising tide of mediocrity” (National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983). Although debunked repeatedly in the years since its publication, the Reagan administration-appointed National Commission on Excellence in Education’s condemnatory report not only spurred a new round of school improvement initiatives but also ramped up various legislatures’ interest in directing the course of public education, in large measure through increased oversight that could be achieved indirectly by increased testing. At the federal level one result was NCLB and its iterations in the states.

Thirty-plus years after A Nation at Risk the momentum to control schools through testing has increased, and local control by parents and teachers has markedly decreased. A recent uptick has been the promulgation in most states of new high-stakes tests, led by those mandated by the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), a wolf-like curriculum and sheep-like standards clothing.

Part 2: Rhetoric and Political Power 

Digital Age Competencies: Focusing and Sharing

Tom has red paint. Mary has blue paint. Neither can make purple paint unless both share their colors. Keep this notion in mind for a moment.

Much has been written about information overload. It is perhaps the most significant problem of the Digital Age. There’s simply too much information to deal with it all effectively. Consequently, an essential real-world skill that educators must learn, apply to their own work, and teach their students is how to focus attention on information that matters. Just as teachers once taught students how to use the tables of contents, indexes, and glossaries of their textbooks, today’s educators need to teach students how to use abstracts, summaries, keywords, and Internet search strategies to pinpoint information they need to find and use.

This Digital Age competency—focusing—is largely common knowledge. Less common is its counterpart: sharing. Focusing strategies tend to narrow the field of intellectual vision. As a result, information can be isolated and disconnected. Tom’s red paint, Mary’s blue. Bits-and-pieces information does not constitute knowledge acquisition that leads to deep, real-world understanding. This is like the problem teachers often cite of the student who writes well in English class but cannot seem to construct a coherent sentence for a math problem in algebra class or, conversely, the student who is good at math but cannot seem to apply mathematics in the context of a physics or chemistry class. Connections do not necessarily come naturally.

The counterpart to teaching focusing strategies is teaching sharing strategies, such as exchanging information, cooperating, and collaborating. In the Digital Age workplace—now, not in some misty future—success usually depends on teamwork. Tom and Mary need to be taught that if they share their colors, they can make a new color. This realization contradicts our American spirit of rugged independence, which has permeated school culture, but the necessity of focusing and sharing is a Digital Age reality. Education needs to shift into this mode of focusing and sharing if we are serious about preparing our young people for life in this century, rather than the past.

Standardized testing, which is fraught with problems in any case, is particularly problematic from the standpoint of focusing and sharing because most such testing proceeds from a mindset of rugged independence. Most standardized testing ought to be abandoned simply on grounds that it is outmoded and, as a result of its pervasiveness and its past-century modus operandi, is holding back educational progress toward teaching and learning this century’s Digital Age competencies.