Standardized Testing is the KUDZU of public education, part 2.

In the past decade standardized testing has come to dominate public education.  Schools are ranked and evaluated based on test scores.  Federal and state dollars are allocated based on test scores. Principals are fired and hired based on test scores.  Now teachers may be evaluated based on student test scores.  How did we get into this situation?

This trend to place more and more importance on test scores has been a political and not an educational decision.   Significantly, it has been a bipartisan political decision.  Democrats (Davis, Obama, Villaraigosa) and Republicans (Swarzenegger, Bush, Riordan) together with billionaire “reformers” (Broad, Gates) have relentlessly promoted standardized tests as the lingua franca of educational achievement.  The only voices of dissent have been the teachers themselves and their unions, and this dissent has strained the traditional bonds between teacher unions and Democrats.

I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that as test scores have been adopted as the primary measure of student learning, the level of funding for public schools has stagnated and even declined. At the same time all other aspects of children’s lives have deteriorated dramatically.  Health care, housing, nutrition--American children are worse off in all these areas as more and more have slipped into poverty. 

But rather than focus on children’s lives as the cause of problems in education, the bipartisan consensus is emerging that the cause of low test scores is not poverty--hunger, homelessness, ill health--and not inadequate  funding--large class sizes, no support staff, deteriorating facilities.  Instead the primary cause of educational failure is....TEACHERS!   Yes, if teachers will just cooperate by placing the proper emphasis on test scores, then it won’t matter if the children are ill-fed, ill-housed, and in ill-health; it won't matter if classes are large, support negligible, and buildings decrepit. 

But not all teachers are the problem.  According the the prevailing “reform” meme coming from Republicans, many Democrats, and the billionaires, the problem is veteran teachers, i.e., the highest paid teachers who have enough job security, thanks to union strength, to resist the headlong rush to enshrine standardized testing as the ultimate arbiter of educational quality.  Disgracefully, this message has come from political leaders who have never hesitated to take campaign contributions from teachers but who now find it easier to blame high-priced veteran teachers for problems in the schools rather than take on the true cause, poverty.

So let’s sum up.  We have had three decades of Reaganism in which wealth has been steadily distributed up to the corporate elite and away from the middle class.  During this time more and more children have slipped into poverty, and funding for public education (especially in California) has declined or stagnated.  Parallel to these developments we have seen the rise of standardized tests that are cheaper to administer and cheaper to teach than more holistic, authentic measures of student achievement.  Anyone see a pattern here?

In Part 3:  What happened to the progressives?