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