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 

Common Core: 6. Overuse and Misuse of Standardized Testing

Standardized tests are not bad per se. Some standardized tests are useful—for diagnosis, research, and so on. But the wholesale use of mass standardized testing—essentially every student in every school—and the misuse of test results to judge individual students, teachers, schools, and entire districts is simplistic and simply wrong. Complex qualities such as student achievement, teacher quality, and school and district effectiveness cannot be reduced to a number or a set of numbers. No test score should ever constitute more than a tiny fraction of the information used to evaluate a student’s learning or a teacher’s effectiveness. Too many other factors must be considered. Many of them—such as the effects of poverty—are beyond the scope of the school to control or influence.

The Common Core State Standards eventually will come with matching standardized tests to reinforce the standardization of this national curriculum. Whether CCSS tests will replace state tests, such as ISTEP and IREAD in Indiana, or add yet another layer of testing on top of them is still an open question.

Either way, as standardized tests proliferate, teachers concentrate more time (often required by their supervisors) on direct test preparation, drilling their students on a narrow set of tested concepts and shunting aside richer learning opportunities that may, in fact, be lost forever. Education researcher Qiuyun Lin comments, “Standardized tests create a system of education that reduces student learning to scores on a single test, rules out the possibility of discussing student learning in terms of cognitive and intellectual development, growth, social awareness and social conscience, and social and emotional development” (in “Beyond Standardization: Testing and Assessment in Standards-Based Reform.” Action in Teacher Education 23 (4): 43-49).

Over-testing limits students to acquiring basic knowledge at the expense of skills such as critical and creative thinking. When the goal is to determine answer A, B, C, or none of the above, there is no place left in the curriculum for students to develop higher-level thinking. So-called 21st-century skills don’t make the cut, however much they are touted by pundits and policymakers far away from actual classrooms.

University of Colorado researcher William Mathis comments: “As the absence or presence of rigorous or national standards says nothing about equity, educational quality, or the provision of adequate educational services, there is no reason to expect CCSS or any other standards initiative to be an effective educational reform by itself” (in Research-Based Options for Education Policymaking, http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/options). Indeed, CCSS is likely to require added funds from cash-strapped states and local districts, further reducing resources for programs that increase educational equity and broaden access to learning.

Furthermore, the Common Core has been criticized by some, for example in Indiana, as actually offering less rigor than current state standards in language arts and mathematics. This concern alone should give readers pause. Is lowering standards really school “improvement”?

Ultimately CCSS must be questioned for its very foundation. Phillip Harris, Bruce M. Smith, and Joan Harris, authors of The Myths of Standardized Tests (2011) write concerning the barrage of standardized tests in the United States that NCLB was only its “most recent, and most punishing, incarnation.” The same terms apply to the Common Core. The one-size-fits-all philosophy of standardization says, much as the Committee of Ten did in 1892, that a single academic curriculum is suitable for all students—no exceptions—and will guarantee that every one of them will be prepared “for success in college and careers.” Succeeding generations found the Committee of Ten’s nineteenth-century philosophy seriously deficient, and there is no reason to believe that the same philosophy put forward now as the Common Core will prove to be any more successful in the twenty-first century. On the contrary, CCSS is likely to reduce the quality of education for all students.

Common Core: 3. Equity and Equality at Stake

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are touted as a curriculum that will, according to the official CCSS website (http://www.corestandards.org), “provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn.”

Despite claims that development of the standards has been a “state-led” effort merely coordinated by the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), they are in fact a national curriculum. CCSS increases federal control of education and does so without, as is true historically, substantially increasing federal funding. The financial burdens of implementing the new standards reside mainly at the state and local levels.

The control and finance issues are worrying but more so is the matter of how the standards will affect teaching and learning. According to the CCSS leaders: “The standards promote equity by ensuring all students, no matter where they live, are well prepared with the skills and knowledge necessary to collaborate and compete with their peers in the United States and abroad.”

This is essentially the same stance taken by the Committee of Ten in 1892, when a single, rigorous academic curriculum was advocated for all students (see Part 1 of this series). This approach was not found to be equitable a century ago, and skepticism about it working this time around is justified. The reason is blindingly simple: all students are not alike. Their backgrounds, goals, aspirations, interests, abilities, and many other traits vary widely, and success for all cannot be guaranteed by a single-minded curriculum. Socioeconomic status (SES)—in particular, poverty—looms large as a factor in school success.

Standards are not at issue. Indeed, education standards are essential as general guides for teaching and learning. Commentators Brooks and Dietz point out in a recent article in Educational Leadership (Dec. 2012/Jan. 2013), “The Common Core standards themselves aren’t the problem.” The problem is that CCSS “conflates standards with standardization.” And standardization tends to ignore human differences, such as socioeconomic status (SES), thereby producing inherent inequity. “Diversity,” say Brooks and Dietz, “is on the verge of extinction—diversity of curriculum, instructional practices, and assessment.”

Common Core: 1. Getting Started with Standards

Following is the first of eight posts that examine the Common Core State Standards.

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS), despite the word state in the title, define a national curriculum in two subject areas: mathematics and English language arts. The new standards for students in kindergarten through twelfth grade have the potential to profoundly affect education across the United States. Forty-five states, the District of Columbia, four territories, and the Department of Defense Education Activity, which operates schools on American military installations worldwide, have adopted them at this writing. Some states, however, are rethinking whether adoption is a good thing.

CCSS has generated both confusion and controversy. One way to dispel some of the confusion is to look at the origins of these standards. They are, in fact, merely the latest in a long line of attempts to define the purposes of education and to establish guidelines for what student should learn.

A starting point for the modern era is 1892. That year the National Education Association appointed a “Committee of Ten,” composed mainly of college presidents and led by Harvard University’s Charles Eliot. The controversy at the time was whether high school should be seen as an end in itself or as a preparation for higher education. The committee concluded that all schools should maintain a single rigorous academic curriculum and that all students should master it. This is essentially the same philosophical stance as the new CCSS.

A shift from this stance occurred in 1918, when the National Education Association published the “Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education.” These principles endorsed different curricula for different students with a focus on the whole child. They were a reaction to the rigidity of the single-minded academic curriculum promulgated by the Committee of Ten that was seen as detrimental, in particular, to immigrants and a cause of the increasing dropout rate during that era because the one-size-fits-all curriculum failed to consider the effects of students’ socioeconomic status. Poverty disadvantages students, and the rigid curriculum did nothing to address this problem. A more child-centered curriculum could better take into account external issues, such as poverty.

The next landmark occurred in 1940, with the culmination of the “Eight-Year Study” by the Association for the Advancement of Progressive Education, which had taken up the charge laid down by the Cardinal Principles. The study found that students engaged in a progressive education programs fared better than their counterparts in traditional programs. Progressive students attained better grades, demonstrated more intellectual curiosity, and participated in more student groups.

The progressive wave was challenged during the national hysteria following the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, when America saw itself as falling behind in what was emerging as the space race during the Cold War period. In 1958 the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) was passed. This law provided funds to states and local school districts to beef up the teaching of mathematics, the sciences, and foreign languages. NDEA was the first major federal initiative in public education, which was (and remains by law) largely a state and local responsibility.

The 1960s and 1970s saw a resurgence of progressive education with many critics decrying the traditional curriculum as a perpetuation of social inequality. The U.S. Supreme Court in the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 had declared that state laws establishing racially segregated schools were unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which had set in place a “separate but equal” doctrine that proved to be unworkable. The Brown decision was a tipping point for the civil rights movement that played out over the next two decades and added impetus to the revival of progressive education.