Book review: The tyranny of educational testing and the ethics of responsibility

Journal of Literacy Research, Sep 1999 by Paris, Scott G, Paris, Alison H, Carpenter, Robert D

THE TYRANNY OF EDUCATIONAL TESTING AND THE ETHICS OF RESPONSIBILITY

Fragile Evidence: A Critique of Reading Assessment. Sharon Murphy, with Patrick Shannon, Peter Johnston, and Jane Hansen,1998. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum (10 Industrial Avenue, Mahwah, NJ 07430). Hardcover, 195 pages.

A common admonishment about conversation at the dinner table with relatives and future inlaws is to avoid the topics of politics and religion. In contrast, education appears to be a "safe" topic for conversation, research, and career, at least until it broaches political and religious agenda. So, how could reading education, the practice of nurturing the love of books and learning in eager, young children through instruction in skills of decoding and comprehension, ever be considered a politically volatile arena? The answers to that question illuminate many issues confronting reading educators around the world at the edge of the new millennium. Today, reading instruction is being debated in state legislatures; what counts as "reliable and replicable" research is the subject of federal committees; and assessing reading achievement through wide-scale testing invites comparisons of students, teachers, and nations. Questions about who can read at what level of proficiency, what kinds of instruction or remediation are needed, and other educational topics have become political issues with threatening ramifications for reading educators.

The fundamental issue at stake is control of schools - control of the curriculum, control of teachers' instructional materials and methods, control of accountability systems for recognition of merit, and control of the allocation of resources. Some might say it is about "quality control," whereas others might say it boils down to money, power, and politics. William Bennett, in his recent book The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals (1998) argues that the American public has been numbed into indifference by Presidential transgressions, self justifying politicians, and sensation-seeking journalists. In the parallel universe of education, it might be argued that the politicization of education and repeated criticisms of American teachers and students have desensitized citizens and herded professors back to their tenured towers. Meanwhile, some outraged citizens fight to protect themselves from the flood of the rising tide of mediocrity by building their own levees out of political sandbags such as standards, national tests, vouchers, and tax credits.

It is in this hotly contested political context that several prominent reading educators in their book Fragile Evidence: A Critique of Reading Assessment have dared to raise dissident voices about the control of schools and the agenda for reading education. Their focus is on the tests used to evaluate reading achievement, a seemingly necessary and innocuous part of education, but as they so adroitly reveal, a practice that can oppress many students and teachers, corrupt the curriculum, and contribute to injustice and inequity in educational opportunities. It is a problem endemic to American education, but it is increasingly evident in Canada, Australia, Japan, and countries around the world where the repoliticization of education is conducted through many means, including testing practices. "Somehow, when politicians become involved in assessment, assessment becomes less about assessment and more about power and control" (p. 162). This team of authors, with international identities and perspectives, brings a wealth of expertise to the analysis of the impact of assessment practices on reading education and, ultimately and far more importantly, of the effects on children learning to read.

Fragile Evidence includes 10 chapters, arranged in five parts, with some chapters written specifically by the coauthors (Patrick Shannon, Peter Johnston, and Jane Hansen) but most written by Sharon Murphy Part I introduces the legal metaphor that is the motif for the entire volume, namely, tests provide evidence about the performance and abilities of students that are used to render judgments. Murphy considers the parallels between legal and educational systems that use evidentiary arguments based on testimony and artifacts to arrive at decisions, guilt or innocence in the courtroom, and success or failure in the classroom. But what counts as evidence in both contexts is subject to the vagaries and liabilities of definition and interpretation. Murphy claims that there is a "world of information largely absent from any discussion of what counts as reading" (p. 6), and she hopes this book leads to a more pervasive understanding of how reading is defined, assessed, represented, and implemented in schools as a function of prevailing academic and political beliefs. The metaphor of legal evidence to characterize reading assessment is provocative and useful. It stimulates, for example, a discussion of how traditional psychometric approaches define reading statistically, based on brief samples of performance on specific subtests of skills based on fill-in-the-bubble multiplechoice tests and on norm-referenced distributions of scores. The metaphor makes us question whether these representations of reading are accurate and useful - whether the evidence provided is unbiased and sufficient for making crucial educational decisions.