Rapp, 8:28 a.m.:

Before I moved to Vermont in 2002, I lived in Ohio where standardized tests and national frameworks created environments where recess was eliminated, teachers' salaries were linked to test scores, children became ill during testing, teachers' job satisfaction waned, and, ironically, less appeared to be learned. Ohio is an important example to study in relation to Vermont. Ten years ago Ohio teachers were either optimistic about the evolving state frameworks or they thought the latest wave of "reform" would soon end. Many suggested that a balance of state and local power could be reached. Others thought that it was their responsibility to uphold the state testing system even if it was unreliable and/or unethical. Few forecasted that within six years 95 percent of teacher's time would be directed to frameworks and assessments developed outside of local communities, or that schools could become such dehumanizing places. Today Vermont is where Ohio was 10 years ago. The Vermont educators with whom I work report that more money, time, and philosophy are being directed to testing and test preparation, enriching opportunities for students are evaporating, and local control of curriculum is eroding. This analysis may appear alarmist within Vermont's history of civic independence, and there are many teachers who believe that NCLB will never evolve to the extreme that I described earlier. However, this is exactly how many educators and citizens felt in Ohio ten years ago!

Not everyone is negatively affected by nor opposed to high-stakes testing. Testing is a booming market where companies like McGraw-Hill and Harcourt-Brace are reaping record profits with the sale of the textbooks, tests, practice tests, and improvement kits. Schooled-to-order children force-fed on scripted curriculum also benefit big business. As testing proceeds to earlier grades, even kindergarten, CEO’s and industrial “leaders” can rest even more assured that future employees will not have the skills, knowledge, dispositions, and collective consciousness to recognize and act to change disparities of wealth, loss of jobs, lack of health care, and corporate corruption in the organizations in which they work. High-stakes testing also ensures a market for pharmaceutical companies, like Merck and Pfizer, whose sales of anxiety, depression, and attention drugs for children have dramatically increased as kids are doped into educational submission. Finally, high stakes testing provides legislators with platforms for higher office. Kids, in this sense, are used by politicians as guinea pigs in an effort to leverage national recognition through state-to-state comparisons.

Often over-shadowed by a focus on higher standards and test scores by politicians, who are anything but accountable themselves, are deeper social problems that increased test-scores will never address. At this time in the United States: 5% of the population has 95% of the wealth; middle and lower income citizens are working 10 hours more than 1990 (that is 180 hours a year away from families) for less money; U.S. citizens have nearly four weeks less vacation time on average than do people in almost all other industrialized countries; at least 25% of US citizens do not have health coverage; half the new jobs created are at minimum wage (that is $10,800 a year); one in five children in the U.S. go to school hungry; the U.S. is bankrupting it’s future generations by wracking up a record deficit; programs for the elderly are being cut; global warming and environmental degradation are more apparent by the day; and, Iraq and Afghanistan are out of control. Now, I ask, if every child in every state passed her state tests would these injustices in any way be lessened? Absolutely not! The erosion of local control, democratic forums, and support of public services, be it social security or education, are intended processes and outcomes. The testing and standardization movements, in this sense, represent a form of social control at a time people are becoming increasingly aware of the “real” problems facing us, more than a check on the quality of schooling.

Phelps, 3:54 p.m.:

This should be an interesting week. I am curious to see if Dr. Rapp has something even harsher to say about testing after associating it with alleged corporate desires to transform our children into automatons and boost drug sales. Probably, I share many of his political views, but I do not believe that most of those mentioned have much relevance to the issue under debate.

Nonetheless, perhaps it is appropriate that we start with first principles.

Like it or not, the U.S. Constitution grants (by deference) responsibility for education to our country's original founding entities, the states, and not to local districts nor to education professionals.

State executives and legislators have the right, and the responsibility, to determine education policy. By implementing high-stakes testing programs, state officials are being responsive to their constituents, who strongly favor such programs.

Moreover, public school educators are public employees, paid by the public to serve the public, and not to do what educators may personally prefer. I suspect that when many educators use terms like "local control" they are really longing for a return to a system that educators effectively controlled, at a level of government where, unlike at the state level, they faced no substantial countervailing power. The fact is, standardized testing programs are an expression of democracy. If the public was strongly opposed to them, politicians would be, too, regardless what corporate executives might want.

Sure, high-stakes tests can be stressful. But, a completely stressless life is a pretty dull life. Student surveys for decades have revealed little to no evidence of student stress (from academics, anyway).

Indeed, boredom and a lack of challenge have been more frequent complaints. Moreover, the high-stakes tests we give tend to be very low level, so low that virtually any student who makes an effort to pass can eventually pass (see, for example, the Mass Insight survey of students who failed the MCAS the first time).

By contrast, high-stakes tests in most other industrialized countries are more challenging and more numerous. Most of those testing programs have been in place for many years, students take them in stride, and educators not only support them, typically they are integrally involved in constructing them (see, for example, the work of Eckstein and Noah, or Kangmin Zeng's Dragon Gate).

Let me conclude by emphasizing two points on which Dr. Rapp and I seem to agree.

First, it is not appropriate to give high-stakes tests to very young school children, largely because the scores are not reliable given the volatility of growth rates at that age.

Second, Dr. Rapp is correct that teacher support for high-stakes testing has declined in recent years, just as the stakes have been increasingly applied to them. I know of no other country where high stakes are sometimes applied to teachers and schools but not to students.

We have this odd juxtaposition in part because of the federal government's limited power of enforcement in the Title 1 program (i.e., the No Child Left Behind Act).

I believe that the limitation is unfortunate. If one is going to go to all the trouble of developing and implementing a high-stakes testing program, one might as well get the most out of it. Students take their studies more seriously when exams count. Holding teachers, but not students, accountable for student performance not only puts teachers in a difficult and unfair position, but a somewhat degrading one.

For further reading on these points, see:

The AAP-School Division executive summary of Kill the Messenger: The War on Standardized Testing

Eckstein, M.A. & Noah, H.J. (1993). Secondary school examinations: International perspectives on policies and practice. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Phelps, R P. (2005). Persistently positive: Forty years of public opinion on standardized testing. Chapter 1 in R.P. Phelps, Ed. Defending Standardized Testing. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp.122.

Zeng, K. (1999). Dragon Gate: Competitive examinations and their consequences. London: Cassell.

Taking Charge: Urban High School Students Speak Out About Academics, MCAS and Extra-Help Programs - intensive study designed to probe the perspectives and behavior of urban high school students in Massachusetts who did not pass their high-stakes MCAS tests as tenth graders. (March 2002)

Rapp, 9:09 a.m.:

I probably could and would say something harsher about how corporations dominate society and shape social policy, but no doubt each of us knows this (witness Enron and Exxon-Mobil). The Business Roundtable and Achieve Incorporated, for example, do formally and informally lobby for certain types of school funding, vouchers, testing, accountability, et cetera. In fact, when I testified before the Governor’s Commission for Student Success in Ohio several years ago, the influence of the business community was quite telling. There was only one teacher out of 25 Commission members and all the committees were run by business “leaders”. Moreover, it was quite clear that the Commission was, in the words of the Commissioner of Education, working to “convince the public that high-stakes tests, numerical accountability, and standards (as if there weren’t any already) were legitimate.” To “convince” is different than to “engage” the public in a debate about the merits of such a policy agenda. Any time that my government moves from engaging me in a debate to convincing me that something is necessary I become skeptical, like I am regarding the false pretenses for the Iraq war and the Bush administrations neglect of nearly unanimous scientific agreement over global warming.

To think that the issues like poverty, the military draft, health care, and clean environments are not related to curriculum, NCLB, or testing is ridiculous. I will use Ohio as an example again. Not only did I study and document students’ reactions to testing through their art work, I studied childhood poverty rates. At almost every school I visited during tests I witnessed students who were getting sick, in many cases throwing up. I witnessed recess and lunch times being cut to improve test scores. I documented how arts programs were being cut and funds shifted to pump out higher performance. I would never argue that this is the type of stress that is good for our human development. More specifically, as it relates to social and economic conditions, one in four children in Ohio’s schools went to school hungry (the figure is one in five for the country). I studied a school in Lorain, Ohio where 13 kids were homeless on average each night. Many of the homeless kids came from families where both parents were working. Simply, before I support mandatory tests, I want to mandate that no child be hungry, no child live on the streets, and no child have to go without health care, including dental. At least one quarter of all the students I studied had trouble focusing because of tooth aches. I don’t think that Mr. Phelps would disagree with me when I say that many of these social problems are alleviated or lessened in the countries that he referenced in relation to international testing phenomena. When they arrived at school for their drill and skill--they were an underperforming school--children were told they were no excuses for failure.

I’ll save a discussion about the aims of education for another day. Obviously Mr. Phelps and I would disagree. Also, I do believe that education is a state responsibility and that the citizens of each state should determine the aims and processes of an education. This did not happen in Ohio and it sure is hell not happening nationally to a great degree. How is it that the federal government only provides between 5-10% of total funding, but that educators are reporting that 90-95% of their time is directed towards meeting NCLB-a federal policy.

I’ll address the issue of public opinion and then end by returning to how big business and industry influence public schooling and testing. First, in terms of the public supporting NCLB, we must remember not only the story I mentioned earlier, but also numerous cases of the federal government paying journalists to romanticize NCLB and providing media with NCLB advertisements. This was a propaganda campaign that was quite successful. When Rod Paige, former Secretary of Education, stated that the debate about NCLB and testing was over, he was lying, because there never was a debate. Why is it that academic research and teacher input were and are ignored if it does not support testing or NCLB. Like the Iraq war, ideology and false evidence trumped reality. Yes, the public can be duped as witnessed by the fact that half of all US citizens believe we found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq--a complete fallacy. And yes, the public can be duped into believing that NCLB and rigorous testing--school testing factories, are legitimate. Unfortunately, the more we rely on high-stakes tests (I have also documented how teachers are reporting that “intellectually engaging activities” and “class discussions” have dramatically decreased as testing invades everything they are doing), the stupider and more gullible we become. Many of us can spit out and recite bits of information on demand, but how many of us can piece together the contexts, histories, and complexities that underlie so much of what intellect is about? Unfortunately, NCLB--whether intended or not--is creating school atmospheres based on the latter.

I’ll get back to the corporate influence tomorrow.

Dana

I recommend the following sites:

Fairtest.org
SusanOhanian.org
Vermont Society for the Study of Education

Phelps, 4:30 p.m.:

Professor Rapp raises a number of interesting issues today, and I hope that I can respond sufficiently to at least some of them. Included among them is my favorite–the censorship and suppression of education information. But, I must save that discussion for later this week when I can focus on it. I wish to discuss the censorship and suppression of education information because I happen to believe that it is the single most serious problem in U.S. education policy. Incidentally, I believe that Dr. Rapp and I may substantially agree on the issue.

First, some quick details. There was debate over the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. It took place in the U.S. Congress over the course of at least several months. The Act was passed with huge margins in both houses and both parties.

I followed the heavy press coverage of the issue and a story that had anything nice to say about standardized testing in general or NCLB in particular was very difficult to find during this period time. The media were overwhelmingly opposed. How Dr. Rapp can believe that his side doesn’t get to have its say baffles me.

Moreover, Dr. Rapp and I do not agree about what standardized tests are or do. They can, for example, focus on rote recall and lower-order thinking, but they do not have to and, to my observation, only very small proportions of standards-based achievement tests could be described as doing so. But, anyone is welcome to look for themselves. Some states post previously-used items on the Web; I know that Florida and Massachusetts do. Go look. This policy of posting actual test items where everyone can see them may seem trivial but, from what I hear, the “face validity” has had a dramatic effect. So many of the accusations made about tests are nonsense, and when anyone can see what the test items look like for themselves, they do not have to accept testing opponents’ word for what they are.

Furthermore, I do not agree that what happens inside classrooms, in the absence of standards and the enforcement of those standards through testing, is necessarily wonderful, creative, and intellectually stimulating. I’ve been in classrooms where the teachers spent most of the hour talking about last night’s TV sitcoms. Most of the kids in those classrooms were fully engaged, participating, and stimulated. So, those were good classes? I suspect that those teachers chose to talk about TV because the students were not really much interested in hearing about history or biology. And, when there are no standards, or the standards are not enforced, essentially we are telling our young that we really do not care if they learn history or biology, so they might as well talk about TV shows.

The public is duped
It should be difficult to say both that things are screwed up because the people don’t get to decide things, but when they do express their opinions, they must be duped if they don’t think the way we do. The public wasn’t duped about NCLB and the Armstrong Williams case, if anything, ended up hurting the Bush Administration. The American public has been overwhelmingly in favor of high-stakes testing for four decades. Every poll of U.S. adults is a poll of experienced former K-12 students. U.S. adults are not unfamiliar with school and they don’t need to have education professionals interpret it to them. They have been there themselves.

Democracy is messy and the people do not always think what one might want them to think. But, unless and until one endeavors to amend the U.S. Constitution to favor some other system of government, we have the system we have, and denying that is foolish.

We must solve so many other problems first
I concur that it would be wonderful if our society devoted more attention to feeding the hungry and housing the homeless. I have myself devoted a substantial amount of my personal time to these two problems. But, standardized testing is not the cause of hunger and homelessness.

Those who suffer the most in an academic environment without standards or the enforcement of standards are the students themselves. Testing is not correlated with stupidity and gullibility, as Professor Rapp suggests; the exact opposite is true. Hundreds of studies over the past several decades have demonstrated that students in courses with clear and measured goals learn more than students without. And students, and their former-student parents, seem to be fully aware of this. Given the choice in surveys between standards and tests and the lethargy and aimlessness of school without them, most students choose the former. It is only education professionals who oppose them.

I wrote yesterday that I concur with Professor Rapp about the decline in teacher support for high-stakes testing in recent years. Nonetheless, these same surveys--including some that Dr. Rapp cites–that reveal teacher dissatisfaction, at the same time reveal that those same teachers are convinced that students study more and learn more when there are standards and those standards are enforced with high-stakes tests.

Well, I see that I have reached my allotted word count, so I will save the rest for later.

For reference:

Benchmarking to the World's Best in Mathematics: Quality Control in Curriculum and Instruction Among the Top Performers in the TIMSS

Phelps, R P (2005). The rich, robust research literature on testing’s achievement benefits. Chapter 3 in R P Phelps, Defending Standardized Testing. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Rapp, 8:34 a.m.:

I received this e-mail from Ryan on Tuesday evening:

Hi Dana :

Now that we’re nearly halfway into the debate, I’d like to let you know about some internal discussion here at the Alliance on how things are going.

So far, entries on both sides have been quite articulate. However, I’d like to see things a bit more focused on the topic of standardized testing. ~Many of your remarks with respect to income inequities, environmental concerns, the war in Iraq and the role of corporations in America definitely have merit; however, Edspresso’s focus is education reform, and we’re really not the platform for these particular issues. I would dearly love to see lots of specific, substantive discussion from you on how the policy of standardized testing, such as: why you think the practice isn’t helping raise the quality of education, why you think it isn’t a fair measure of student knowledge and achievement, what you would like to see change about the practice. Would it be possible for you to head more in this direction?

I’m grateful for your willingness to participate in this; I just would like to see the debate as focused as possible for the benefit of our readers. If you have concerns or questions, please let me know.

Thanks!
Ryan Boots
Website Editor

My response:

Ryan, here are my thoughts. As an "expert" on educational studies, including testing, my focus is on the social and political implications of testing, in addition to the related human cost. To not make these links, according to many researchers, including myself, is naive and debases the history and contexts of public schooling. The debate is often focused in the way that you suggest, and the way that benefits the status quo, without regard to the deeper historical and cultural issues that tests actually hide, distort, or seek to cover up. No, since my work continuously studies how political economies direct educational policy I will not eliminate or avoid discussions of injustice for a more microscopic, and simplistic, discussion of schooling. Perhaps I am wasting my own time--time that could be spent in other areas.

Now, to resume the debate. No doubt Mr. Phelps is an enthusiastic supporter of testing and his research and writing depend upon its expansion and legitimacy--perceived or real. NCLB is a radical agenda which is not to be seen as unrelated to the movement to privatize and corporatize schools. Bill Mathis, a researcher from University of Arizona, recently released a study that predicts that 85% of U.S. public schools will be named failing by 2014 if NCLB continues on its current path. Does this mean that there are really that many horrible schools.? Or does it point to a movement that seeks to discredit public schools and create more market-based initiatives?

To suggest that high stakes testing is not having an overwhelming negative on schools is crazy, as is the notion that the media is anti-NCLB and testing. Also, when I worked with Lowell Rose, Director of Phi Delta Kappa, we published Gallop Polls of the public attitudes about education. The vast majority of respondents stated that they thought their local schools were in the A and B range for quality, but that the quality of public schooling in general, across the country, was decreasing. Why this disparity? No doubt the barrage of negative reporting on public schools by national media played a part.

Now, unless you choose to make yourself entirely ignorant, you cannot help but see that schools are becoming intellectually dead zones that are devoid of creativity. Go to New York City, Boston, or many places in the U.S. and you will see teachers being pressured to raise tests scores at all costs, even if it means creating sterile learning environments.

Moreover, and this is where I return to the influence of business models, my children are not a “performance”; they are not “hard data”; they are not “objectives or standards to be meet”; and they are not a set of “deficiencies.” Simply, they are not human resources to be broken down, mined, and rebuilt within the image of a proficient, global worker. Many of the best teachers I have worked with, and I am in about 75 schools every year, and I work with 1,000s of teachers, say that are ready to leave the profession because testing is demoralizing students and lowering the standards of thought and reflection that are required of a engaged democratic society. For someone like Mr. Phelps not to acknowledge this reality is baffling! And I ask, Mr. Phelps, would you be willing to take the 8th grade reading and math tests in Massachusetts and make your scores public? What if we asked state and federal legislators who have supported increased testing accountability to take the tests and make their scores public? How would they fair? Would most pass? How would they link their career and personal success or failures to test scores? How would parents fair?

Let me repeat, a good part of the testing and accountability movement is not about improving public schools in the long run, it is about destroying them. Who needs an educated work force when China and India can provide skilled employees at a fraction of the cost? And, I find it ironic that many of the same legislators who suggest that we are losing ground in math and science have overseen or pushed for legislation that has created the largest budget and ecological crisis the world has ever seen. Would this have happened if they had higher test scores?

Phelps, 4:19 p.m.:

One problem with trying to pigeonhole people is that one will almost always be wrong. Another problem is that one denies oneself the opportunity to learn what others really think, and why. One denies oneself an opportunity to learn something new.

Certainly, there are many politicians who like the NCLB Act primarily because of its school choice provisions. But, there are certainly many others who do not. I doubt that many of the Democrats who voted for the bill did so because of the school choice provisions. Indeed, probably most of them voted for the bill despite those provisions.

The American Federation of Teachers has long held a strong position in favor of high standards and high-stakes student testing, but they could hardly be fairly described as pro-voucher. I don’t think many, if any, AFT members are mean ogres who hate kids. Nor do AFT members, or anyone else for that matter, think that students are “performances” or “hard data”. But, students can create performances and hard data can be collected about those performances that can be very useful to them and their parents.

Again, those who suffer the most in aimless school programs that lack standards, clear academic goals, and measurement of progress toward those goals are the students themselves. They can be told for 12 years that everything is fine and then graduate uneducated and unskilled. At that point, it may be too late; 12 years of their lives were essentially wasted.

Media Bias
Yes, I most emphatically believe that the media is biased against testing.  I did the arithmetic in chapter 6 of Kill the Messenger.  Most education journalists tend to treat education professors, for example, as if they had no self interest in issues such as testing.  They are just like, say, Chemistry professors.  But, education professors do have a strong self interest in the matter, as they play an integral role in a system they may well wish to protect from outside scrutiny.

In this sense, education professors are less like chemistry professors, and more like researchers at a trade association of chemical manufacturers. Much of the research done in education schools is advocacy research, designed to reinforce a point of view that has already been formed. It is not objective, third party research, conducted by unbiased scientists who are willing to accept any research result.

When most education journalists make the effort to get “an other side” of a story, often all they do is contact a tiny group of Republican Party-affiliated think tankers, whose knowledge of many education issues is astonishingly limited.

My school is great, yours is awful
It should be interesting to see if the old "my school is wonderful but all the others are awful" anomaly holds up now that individual schools are receiving more scrutiny from state report card systems and NCLB reporting requirements.

It is easy to speculate why the anomaly has existed in the past. As the con man, Frank Abnegale, allegedly said, “People only know what you tell them.” And, many school administrators have been more public relations director than academic leader, painting a rosy picture about their schools, whether accurate or not.

The late 1980s “Lake Wobegon” scandal in which the average state score on national tests was above average in all 50 states has been cited by education insiders as a problem with “high-stakes-induced test score inflation.” But, in truth, in all but one of the states, the tests with inflated scores were low- or no-stakes tests, as a casual reading of John J. Cannell’s second report on the scandal reveals. Educators manipulated the administration and scoring of these tests in order to produce artificially high scores. School administrators, and not testing company employees, state education department personnel, or impartial proctors, had full control of these tests from start to finish, and they cheated.

To achieve the inflated results nationwide, an enormous number of educators must have given in to the temptation to reveal test items to teachers beforehand, alter student responses, provide extra time, and so on.  It would seem that educators are no different than most people, with many flaws as well as many virtues. (For more, see The Source of Lake Wobegon.)

Mr. Phelps must be doing this for selfish reasons
The most courageous people I know work inside education and challenge its orthodoxies. I’m not referring to folk like the Republican think tankers, who are perfectly safe, or those who work with business groups, who are perfectly safe, or those education professors who already have tenure, who are mostly safe. I refer to those who work inside education and are willing to say and write such heresy as, say, maybe high-stakes tests are not all bad, without any career protection. They face tenure denial, the loss of their jobs, and perpetual banishment from the education fold.

For all of education schools’ adulation of diversity, they seem to have close to zero tolerance for diversity of opinion.

For more on these issues:

Censorship Has Many Fathers

Southern Regional Education Board

Mass Insight - Education

Rapp, 8:54 a.m.:

I’ll conclude my remarks about testing and NCLB by referencing a personal scenario, some of my recent research, and a final analysis of the contexts that surround the accountability movement.

I (our teacher licensing program) was recently told we were in “contempt” and would not be certified by the Massachusetts Department of Education unless I removed the following italicized words from my curriculum syllabi:

“It is the role of teacher education to point out what works and what is fair about state policy as much as it is point out is unjust and oppressive.”

So, if we are speaking to the issue of squashing dissent or alternative opinions, I strongly agree with Mr. Phelps. It is much easier for people who whole-heartedly endorse NCLB and testing to secure grants, receive state funding, and serve as consultants for various states and think tanks.

I also want to refer to a survey of teachers I recently conducted in Vermont. The response from the Commissioner’s office was that “we know there are some negative aspects of the federal law, but it is our job to enforce it.” My question for my own legislators and my governor is do you feel you owe more allegiance to local communities or the federal government when it comes to determining what is best and how money should be spent? As an old-school Republican who strongly believes in states’ rights, local control, and balanced budgets, I’m concerned. Here is what Vermont teachers reported. Similar findings, as far as I understand it, could be found in every other state. Survey findings include:

• 80% of teachers don’t believe students’ needs are reflected in NCLB;
• 88% believe there is less local control of curriculum: 45% “significantly less”;
• 83% report that NCLB has had a negative effect on education: 44% “very negative”:
• 93% report students’ love of learning is less, 38% much less;
• 90% believe Vermont’s Commissioner of Education is “inaccurate” in believing that NCLB won’t harm schools: 48% “completely inaccurate”;
• 96% report that “enriching activities” are less possible: 50% “much less possible;
• 89% report Vermont classrooms are worse places because of numerical accountability and testing: 40% “much worse”;
• 97% believe NCLB creates more stress for students: 51% say “much more”;
• 73% believe Vermont education is headed in the wrong direction; and
• 88% report that NCLB encourages them to develop “less intellectually engaging activities”;
• 97% believe NCLB encourages them to use more worksheets;
• 92% report that NCLB encourages them to have less class discussions;
• 99% believe that NCLB encourages them to teach to the test.

These findings contradict the suggestion that NCLB won’t harm schools, and, more importantly, teachers believe that NCLB is making schools worse places for children to learn. According to William Mathis, Superintendent of Rutland Northeast Schools and noted scholar, a “bewildering bunch of box-scores is being used to determine whether schools make ’adequate yearly progress’ by improving their state standardized test scores.”

Mathis goes on to say that these “standards” are far from benign: “if schools don't make AYP, school and community reputations, property values, teachers' pride, children's motivation, and parents' school support are all affected.” The results from this survey illuminate the disparity between what supporters and enforcers of NCLB and standardized testing are saying is happening in schools and what teachers are reporting. If anything, Governors and Commissioners of Education must do more than convince citizens that NCLB is a positive force, they have a responsibility to engage us in a vibrant and transparent conversation its legitimacy and whether the benefits of testing outweigh the costs.

Finally, the most formidable challenges for children and adults in the years to come (paying the bills, clean air and water, endless war, global warming, record deficits, health care coverage, and poverty, for example) are continuously overshadowed by a telescopic focus on performance and high achievement. Millions of people in this country, and billions around the world, are barely scraping by as messiahs of school change drum on about the need for “high performing schools,” “new sciences of leadership,” and “continuous improvement.”

The activities of students and educators are increasingly governed by the irrational criteria of efficiency, profit, and quick returns rather than being inspired by a vision for a just society. Skilled and paid performance, or competence, is the overwhelming aim of U.S. educational agendas. Students and teachers are manipulated in a system that regards them more as “administered subjects” and “resources to be developed rather than human beings who are valued in themselves and who are encouraged to choose and shape their own future” (Morgan, 1990, p. 70).

I’ll leave with a quote from the Indian philosopher, Krishnamurti, because I think it illuminates the distinction between a person who possesses a bag of visible knowledge and one who is wise:

“As most of our education is the acquisition of knowledge, it is making us more and more mechanical; our minds are functioning along narrow grooves….All this leads to a mechanistic way of life, a mental standardization, and so gradually the State, even a democratic state, dictates what we should become.”

Phelps, 4:30 p.m.:

I believe that some of the topics have already been addressed.
For the alleged “open, vibrant, & transparent” character of education schools and mainstream education research, see the last 2 Wednesday paragraphs. By the way, the benefits of testing do outweigh the costs, by a long margin. See Tuesday’s two references.

Teacher opinion: last 3 paragraphs Monday, 2nd-to-last paragraph Tuesday.

The oddity of NCLB: last 3 paragraphs Monday. NCLB is not the way I would design an accountability system, if I had the opportunity. It is the way it is because of limitations in the U.S. Constitution and the type of leverage allowed the federal government through Title 1 of the ESEA. There’s no doubt about it, NCLB is a very odd duck; I cannot imagine any other country choosing such a structure.

Public opinion on testing in general: last six paragraphs Tuesday.
The following source includes a review and listing, with the statistics for over 200 polls that included questions about standardized testing in the schools:
Phelps, R P. (2005). Persistently positive: Forty years of public opinion on standardized testing. Chapter 1 in R.P. Phelps, Ed. Defending Standardized Testing. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp.122.

The Republicans
Dr. Rapp asserts that those who have wholeheartedly endorsed NCLB and testing get preference for grants, funding, and consultancy slots. But, that’s not really how it has worked. It wasn’t until late 2003 that any of the research and policy people who serve the Republican Party had anything nice to say about testing or NCLB. This isn’t because they were open-minded, they simply didn’t know much of anything about the topic.

The United States (and Canada, too, for that matter) is an educational testing backwater. Most everyone else has long ago been through this rudimentary debate and they have now had multi-level, multi-target high-stakes testing systems in place for decades. Ironically, many of the world’s wisest, most experienced, most accomplished testing experts live in North America, in the industrialized world’s testing backwater. Some of these people are intimately involved in consulting on testing policy in other countries ...but, not here.

These same experts carefully guard what they say in the United States, because those “open, vibrant, & transparent” education schools would deny them tenure if they said here what they say over there, and that (often vicious and petty) “open, vibrant, & transparent” mainstream education research community would blacklist them.

I had fully expected that the Republican research and policy folk would tap into this terrific resource–the world’s foremost testing experts–as soon as they could in 2000 or 2001, to help them design, justify, and support NCLB. I’m still waiting.

Instead, the Republican research and policy advisors, nested in think tanks, academia, foundations, and in political slots in the federal government, have insisted for several years now that no research had ever been done on the effects of high-stakes testing. In truth, hundreds of studies had been done that, one would assume, Republican politicians would like to have known about, had their research and policy advisors not advised them that the evidence did not exist. Instead, the research and policy folk offered that they would get right on the issue, conduct some definitive studies, and get some answers, for a fee, of course.

For example, see:
The First Study Ever of Firstness Braggadocio

Think Tank Thoughtlessness: A Once-in-a-Generation Opportunity Squandered

The Ethereal World of Celebrity Education Research

Think Tanks, Celebrity Research, and the Dissolution of Education Knowledge

During the current Administration, many grants (from the federal government and foundations) have been awarded to researchers because of whom they knew, not because of what they knew or what they advocated, as Dr. Rapp suggests (and some of these people knew nothing about testing).

GOP politicians have been ill served by the research and policy people they have trusted to keep them informed. Instead of a thorough introduction to the topic that could have been produced by world experts, they received undergraduate-quality drafts from researchers with no background in the topic (who just happened to be friends, former students, former staffers, or spouses of GOP research/policy insiders). Instead of providing their Republican politician clients with an informed background on a critical topic, the research and policy people exploited the opportunity to bestow fame and funds upon themselves and their close colleagues.

Over $100 million in federal grant money (and who knows how much more in foundation money) has been dished out to organizations that did not exist in the year 2000. These organizations were formed by cronies of GOP research and policy people, apparently, for the purpose of receiving federal government (i.e., our) largesse. Some of these organizations were shoehorned, by Republicans no less, into competitive markets, where they compete, with government subsidies, against independent firms with no such subsidies.

Freedom for educators
Perhaps Dr. Rapp cannot know, given that his views comport with mainstream education school orthodoxy. To clarify for the reader, however, there exists no open, vibrant, and transparent dialogue in mainstream education research. The nails that stick up by, say, suggesting that testing might have some good qualities, are quickly beaten down inside the mainstream U.S. education research world.

Professor Rapp has complained that there seem to be too many business people and too few education people on government committees that make testing policy. I would invite him to try to look at this issue through the eyes of a taxpaying small businessperson who happens to have some kids in public school.

A small business person faces bankruptcy every day. She deals with fickle consumers, fickle lenders, and brutal financial analysts. Larger business managers must answer to stockholders, a board of directors, and brutal investment analysts at stock brokerages. Though, granted, some of them are well remunerated for their exposure.

I am trying to envision how these business people would try to understand Dr. Rapp’s issue with the MA Department of Education. They could, for example, consult for comparison the syllabi from state medical, law, nursing, or even social work schools, where they will see listings of courses that are all on point, i.e., directly related to the training they purport to offer. As Dr. Rapp describes his course, it does not seem to me to be designed to help someone learn how to teach. As is sometimes said about university English departments these days (i.e., English professors want to teach anything but English), some Education professors seem to want to do anything but train teachers to teach.

So, when, say, small business owners, whose livelihoods are at risk every day, hear the pleas from education professors to be unhindered in their work so that they may offer “rich, creative, innovative” curricula, they tend to be sympathetic at first. Then, they probe a little into the details, and they see the wretched outcomes for their own children. Later, they learn that the complaining education professors are tenured, well-paid, and teach courses like those Dr. Rapp teaches, funded by public tax dollars and teaching public students. In other words, they learn that these education professors are taking no risks, and producing no clear benefits.

Yet, the loudest education-professor complainers still wonder why their complaints sometimes fall on deaf ears.

Richard P Phelps is a member of Third Education Group.