The Dark Side of Nationwide Tests

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 27, 2001 | by B.K. Eakman

President Bush's education initiative calls for the testing of every student in the nation, but these `assessments' in the past involved Big Brother-style psychological profiling.

The proponents of President George W. Bush's education initiative, called "No Child Left Behind," believe that they can make schools accountable to parents as well as taxpayers. The centerpiece of this, as it appears in the amendments to the Elementary and Secondary School Act, still in House-Senate conference as Insight goes to press, is a massive nationwide program designed to test every student in grades three to eight in reading and math. Both House and Senate bills propose some $400 million in federal funds to be sent to the states to devise and administer the tests on a state-by-state basis.

By giving tax money to each state to devise its own tests, supporters hope to mollify conservatives on the one hand, who fear national indoctrination by the U.S. Department of Education, and liberals on the other, who dread the consequences of holding educators personally accountable for whether the children they teach actually learn. The language of the House bill, HR1, for example, states in an unresolved contradiction that each state shall demonstrate that it has adopted "challenging academic standards and challenging academic-achievement standards." In the same breath, the bill says that "a state shall not be required to submit such standards to the Secretary."

The problem is that "academic standards" as defined by common sense and by lawmakers tend to be meaningless when defined by educators. The bill calls for "challenging academic-content standards in academic subjects that specify what children are expected to know and be able to do" and contain "coherent and rigorous content ... and encourage the teaching of advanced skills." Yet both House and Senate bills shy away from using the term "tests" and substitute the edu-speak word "assessments."

The reason is that public education during the last 30 years has tended against testing for knowledge of content, instead emphasizing a psychological assessment of a child's needs, background and ability to conform to the group. A "test" is an objective measure of a child's ability to solve a problem; an "assessment" is a social scientist's speculation about the environmental conditioning of the child.

Thus the "assessment" of a child's ability to read or to do math in the current testing already in use has more to do with probing the child's psyche and teaching him or her to conform to group values than with testing ability to add two plus two. The leading educational experts will read the bill's language as a license to invade the privacy of every child in the country rather than hold failing schools accountable. And since the bill necessarily honors the principle of local control, it is likely the local educational bureaucracies doing the controlling will welcome the bill as a $400 million slush fund to do exactly what they have been doing to thwart educational reform.

The trouble with school tests begins with the increasing inclusion of sophisticated "behavioral" components that encompass a wide variety of lifestyle and opinion data, nailing down student proclivities, social attitudes and parent-inculcated worldviews. Combined with the plethora of "health" (sex and drug) surveys, mental-health screenings, diary/journal-keeping and other miscellaneous questionnaires -- mostly taking place in the classroom under cover of academics -- testing has become more equated with personality inventories than proficiency exams. In that context, what passes for testing even may undermine the accountability President Bush advocates.

The case against standardized tests hinges on the quantum leap in data-gathering, cross-matching and information-sharing capabilities, with all the accompanying problems associated with data-trafficking, invasion of privacy and consumer profiling. Barely a week goes by that a publication somewhere doesn't carry a story detailing a new affront to what used to be considered "nobody's business."

One of the earliest examples of psychological data-gathering under the cover of academics occurred in the pivotal 1980s, when enormous breakthroughs in computer technology were being piloted with federal funds in selected localities. One of those was in Allegheny County, Pa., initiated under the eight-state Cooperative Accountability Project. A handful of parents -- among them, Gen Yvette Sutton, Anita Hoge and Francine D'Alonzo -- got wind of a standardized academic test "no one could possibly study for" being disseminated in the McGuffey School District: the Educational Quality Assessment (EQA). After several unsuccessful attempts to gain access, a trip to the state education agency in Harrisburg finally yielded the facts. Not only did more than one-half the questions not relate to factual knowledge, but numerical codes next to the questions as printed on the administrative version of the test turned out to correlate with specific "remediating" curricula. It included questions such as: