Will Standards Save Public Education?

• Author: Miner, Barbara

Will Standards Save Public Education? by Deborah Meier Beacon. 90 pages. $12.00.

Test scores have become the defining motif of what passes for school reform these days. Across the country, students, teachers, and schools are being rewarded or punished based on standardized test scores. Whether you are smart, stupid, lazy, or hardworking is being reduced to how fast and how accurately you can darken the circles on a multiple-choice test.

This test-based reform model began about a decade ago with a call for standards, especially high standards (as if anyone were calling for low standards). This morphed into a reliance on standardized tests to determine if high standards were being met. Today, children are being flunked, denied access to a preferred program or school, or even refused a high school diploma on the basis of a single standardized test.

The obsession with test scores is not likely to go away any time soon, despite growing criticism from parents and teachers. Too many politicians, corporate leaders, and think tanks have embraced test-based reform as the only way to shake up our public schools and get more bang for the taxpayers' buck.

Currently, forty-nine states have state standards in core academic subjects, up from fourteen in 1996. (Iowa is the only holdout, prompting author and anti-testing advocate Alfie Kohn to comment, "Thank God for Iowa.") A growing number of states--twenty-seven at last count--are implementing high-stakes tests. In addition, many school districts are, on their own, adopting the same approach.

Does this mean, as many politicians would have you believe, that at last we are cracking down on unmotivated students, burnt-out teachers, and bureaucratic urban systems--and ensuring that all schools provide a minimal level of academic quality?

Unfortunately, no. As these three books underscore, relying on standardized tests to gauge academic quality has devastating consequences. It leads to a dumbed-down curriculum that values rote memorization over in-depth thinking, exacerbates inequities for low-income students and students of color, and undermines true accountability among schools, parents, and community.

There is growing evidence that the emphasis on standards and high-stakes tests is also a way to reassert official control over knowledge and to counter movements that demanded a more multicultural and diverse approach to what students should learn.

What's on these tests?

In some states, the content is a...