High-Stakes Hustle: Public Schools and the New Billion Dollar Accountability

Educational Forum, The, Fall 2004 by Baines, Lawrence A, Stanley, Gregory Kent

Testing allows public officials to pretend that nothing external to the classroom influences student behavior, enabling what Claybaugh (2003, 60) called "the fraud of limitless teacher accountability" to run rampant.

The Beauty of Numbers

The most obvious benefit of high-stakes testing is that it enables a numeric value to be attached to every school and every student in the country. The reverence for numbers is an obsession that dates from the days of Isaac Newton, who promised that everything in the universe operated under quantifiable laws and demonstrable order. Unfortunately, like lines from Shakespeare, numbers can be molded to suit a particular purpose. It is common practice for pseudoscientists and politicians to promulgate absurd theories behind a flash of statistics and solid scientific data.

For example, Samuel Morton, one of the most famous men of science in antebellum America, believed that races could be ranked in order based upon easily quantifiable terms-in this case, head size. Craniometry offered a quick, simple, and undeniable answer to the problem of measuring human intelligence and soon swept through America and Europe. The only problem with craniometry was that it had no basis in scientific fact. To sell his theory, Morton cooked the data, discarded evidence that failed to support his findings, and exaggerated results that seemed to fit his theory. "To put it bluntly," Gould (1981, 57) wrote, "Morion's summaries are a patchwork of fudging and finagling in the clear interest of controlling a priori conclusions."

Craniometry lost its luster when IQ tests became the rage. The lure of IQ scores was that they required no physical measurement. Instead, a number representing general intelligence added a great deal of portability to the notion of measuring intelligence. A number could be calculated without even meeting the individual in question, and then numbers could be compared and ranked. Unfortunately, Binet's tests were utilized by eugenicists who, like Morton, saw a quick and easy way to measure human intelligence. Eugenicists, such as Goddard and Yerkes, believed that a better world could be achieved immediately without waiting around for evolution or the arduous process of social change. Their solution was simple: identify the inferior people and keep them from breeding. Goddard advocated confinement centers for the unfit and a ban on undesirable immigration.

Yerkes fanned the flames of anti-immigration fervor by citing the low scores of Black Americans and newly arrived Southern Europeans on Army Intelligence Tests during World War I. Through such comparison, Yerkes sought to reveal what everyone already knew: Black Americans and Southern European immigrants were morons who threatened the future of the nation. According to Yerkes (1921), test scores provided sufficient proof of genetic inferiority.

At the time, no one thought to question how a score on an exam that queried knowledge of American history and baseball would correlate with an individual's performance as a soldier on the battlefield or as a citizen of the United States. Instead, panic hit the nation and books poured off printing presses warning real Americans of the danger of the quantifiable menace (Wiggam 1923). Even the federal government bowed before the numbers, and in the 1920s Congress legislated a near-ban on inferior immigrants. It did so even though its own data gathered by the Dillingham Commission refuted the numbers gathered through Army Intelligence Tests (Higham 1955).