Arts & Culture

WHY TESTS DON'T TEST WHAT WE THINK THEY DO

By Deborah Meier

The culture of the small schools I've described so far --with all its complexities and possibilities-- is threatened every day by the rampant spread of standardized testing and standardized curricula in schools today. We are witnessing a radical redefinition of the task of public education, driven by the widespread belief that by focusing our attention on externally imposed tests we can both produce higher achievement and restore public trust in our schools. I will argue that quite the opposite is true: the increasing use of standardized tests both undermines achievement and increases the distrust we have for teachers, students, and our own judgements. Some schools and some communities --especially privileged ones-- can treat testing as a game and continue to do their own thing (if they don't get caught up in annually outdoing their rivals). But for those schools at the bottom to start with, the new regime of standardization is deadly medicine, with no redeeming virtues. To fully understand why it is dangerous to base schooling on standardized testing, we need to look at the tests closely. We need to see what they can and cannot do --and why more and better ones are not the answer. We need to see how in all their varied guises they run directly counter to the kind of intellectual work being proposed in the schools I've described and the kind of relationships of trust that underlie the culture of such schools. Finally, we need to explore alternatives to testing that serve its legitimate purposes but that are more consistent with an education for powerful citizenship.

      Growing up in the thirties and forties, I was not exposed to standardized tests --or if I took any, the scores were kept secret. Some kids took the newly invented SATs if they wanted to get into an Ivy League school. But since I was going to Midwestern college, I didn't even take those. Still I wasn't a test doubter. In 1964 I eagerly supported neighborhood and civil rights activists, including two long time friends Ann Cook and Herb Mack, who stole secret test data from Chicago public schools' central offices to prove the system's racism. We were right about the racism, but we were wrong in thinking that the tests would prove for long a useful tool in reversing it.

      The modern testing enterprise was designed as a response to the novel idea that trust could be scientifically defined. While standardized testing as an ancient history, it is only at the turn of the twentieth century that interest in what came to be called psychometrics revolutionized the world of standardized testing. Originally designed to objectively classify subgroups by IQ, and thus steeped in the racial and class biases of the time, standardized tests were seen a half century later as a way to undermine such biases. They appeared to some to offer an objective and thus possibly a more trustworthy way to determine true merit than the judgment of teachers and counselors. Behind the increased interest in standardized testing for school uses was also reasonable and in fact responsible skepticism: a demand that schools have ways to show parents and citizens that their increasingly important judgments of students were unbiased --beyond the corruptions of power and prejudice.

Deborah Meier is the MacArthur Award-winning founder of the Central Park East School in East Harlem and the Mission Hill School in Boston, where she is currently co-principal. She has been a fellow at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. Meier is also author of The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem (Beacon Press).

This excerpt is taken from In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and Standardization published by Beacon Press and available in paperback in August 2003.