Standardized Minds: The High Price of America's Testing Culture and What We Can Do to Change It. - Review - book review

Progressive, The, August, 2000 by Barbara Miner

Standardized Minds: The High Price of America's Testing Culture and What We Can Do to Change It by Peter Sacks Perseus Books. 351 pages. $25.00.

Test scores have become the defining motif of what passes for school reform these days. Across the country, students, teachers, and schools are being rewarded or punished based on standardized test scores. Whether you are smart, stupid, lazy, or hardworking is being reduced to how fast and how accurately you can darken the circles on a multiple-choice test.

This test-based reform model began about a decade ago with a call for standards, especially high standards (as if anyone were calling for low standards). This morphed into a reliance on standardized tests to determine if high standards were being met. Today, children are being flunked, denied access to a preferred program or school, or even refused a high school diploma on the basis of a single standardized test.

The obsession with test scores is not likely to go away any time soon, despite growing criticism from parents and teachers. Too many politicians, corporate leaders, and think tanks have embraced test-based reform as the only way to shake up our public schools and get more bang for the taxpayers' buck.

Currently, forty-nine states have state standards in core academic subjects, up from fourteen in 1996. (Iowa is the only holdout, prompting author and anti-testing advocate Alfie Kohn to comment, "Thank God for Iowa.") A growing number of states--twenty-seven at last count--are implementing high-stakes tests. In addition, many school districts are, on their own, adopting the same approach.

Does this mean, as many politicians would have you believe, that at last we are cracking down on unmotivated students, burnt-out teachers, and bureaucratic urban systems--and ensuring that all schools provide a minimal level of academic quality?

Unfortunately, no. As these three books underscore, relying on standardized tests to gauge academic quality has devastating consequences. It leads to a dumbed-down curriculum that values rote memorization over in-depth thinking, exacerbates inequities for low-income students and students of color, and undermines true accountability among schools, parents, and community.

There is growing evidence that the emphasis on standards and high-stakes tests is also a way to reassert official control over knowledge and to counter movements that demanded a more multicultural and diverse approach to what students should learn.

What's on these tests?

In some states, the content is a closely guarded secret. In other states, some of the questions are released publicly. In Massachusetts, which is more open than most, Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson took a look at the tenth-grade history test. His conclusion? "At best, it is silly. At worst, it is racist."

"The test, which focuses on `world' history, had fifty-seven items," he wrote in a column this June. "Of the fifty-seven items, about forty referred to Europe, from the Byzantine Empire to the Cold War. Five are questions about capitalism. Only twelve are about the rest of the world."

Test-based reform also edges out discussion about what is truly needed to ensure an excellent education for all students--that all schools receive adequate funding, that all students have a qualified teacher and access to a rigorous curriculum, and that classes be small enough to ensure individual attention and meaningful relationships between students and adults.

Most important, standardized tests will never answer the most fundamental question of all: What do our children need to learn to be leaders and informed citizens in a multicultural, ever-changing world?

But don't take my word for it. Start by reading Standardized Minds: The High Price of America's Testing Culture and What We Can Do to Change It, by Peter Sacks, a journalist based in Boise, Idaho, who writes in an accessible style.

Sacks provides a comprehensive overview, starting with the origins of standardized testing early in this century as a way to measure intelligence and provide data for theories about the intellectual superiority of Northern European whites. He also draws out the relationship between these earlier uses of standardized tests and today's misuses. "Polite society nowadays has its own `defectives' who don't measure up on standardized tests of so-called intelligence," he writes. "Once upon a time, they were Italian and Jewish immigrants. Now, they are the poor, the uneducated, African Americans, American Indians, people with learning `disabilities,' those for whom English is a second language, and others. In the past, the designated defectives were said to be genetically inferior. Now it is simply said that, according to this snapshot on this objective test, they lack requisite abilities, cognitive development, or aptitude. Curiously, the outcome has remained eerily similar in both eras, punishing those not born to the right parents and attending the right schools."

The strength of Sacks's book is that he provides the evidence to back up his critique. In chapter after chapter, he shows not only what is wrong with standardized tests, but also how what he calls the "accountability machine" has invaded classrooms across the country.