Michael Weiner Weiner is a fourth-year history
and political science student. His column analyzing issues of
interest to the UCLA community runs on Mondays. E-mail [email protected].
One of President Bush’s first actions in office last week
was to announce his plan for improving public education, and not
surprisingly, “accountability” was the watchword of the
day.
Whenever they’re talking about educational policy,
politicians love to use that word ““ it makes them sound tough
but fair, compassionate but uncompromising. It also
compartmentalizes the issue very nicely, implying that the
educational problems in this country stem from individual schools
and districts, not from any flaw in the fundamental assumptions
that govern all of our schools.
In reality, “accountability,” in the sense that it
is used by policymakers like Bush and Gov. Gray Davis, is nothing
more than a codeword for standardized testing. And herein lies the
problem: the systematic use of such tests is an obstacle to
creating better schools and smarter students; it is not part of the
solution.
We live in a culture of testing, in which people’s
intelligence is measured by their ability to jump through
preordained societal hoops, not by their intellectual curiosity,
their creativity or their drive to help others and contribute to
society. Who is to say that knowing what the word,
“loquacious” means is more important than any of these
things?
Psychologically, tests like the SAT and the Stanford 9
achievement test can be devastating to students from disadvantaged
communities with crumbling schools and overworked teachers, who are
told from an early age that their chances of succeeding are between
slim and none.
Schools are supposed to teach children to think, not only so
they can build successful lives for themselves, but so they can
understand their place in the world and their responsibility to it.
But as standardized tests become the center of the educational
universe, students are increasingly taught according to the
dictates of the exams.
K-12 achievement tests stifle pedagogical creativity by creating
a disincentive for teachers and school administrators to innovate.
Because policymakers are so intent on holding schools
“accountable” by using standardized tests, teachers
hesitate to do anything but instruct their students to get a high
score. Whether they actually learn anything is largely irrelevant,
as far as politicians are concerned.
When the SAT was first conceived half a century ago, it was
considered to be a means for leveling the playing field by
providing an objective measure of merit. But in today’s world
of expensive test prep courses, grossly unequal public schools and
racial stratification, the SAT has become a barrier to color- and
class-blind achievement. As social thinker Nicholas Lemann wrote in
his 1999 book, “The Big Test: The Secret History of American
Meritocracy,” that “a device meant to eliminate an
American class system has instead helped to create a new
one.”
Besides acting as a barrier to meaningful learning and
achievement, the culture of testing also subtly encourages
cheating, not only among students but among teachers as well.
Standardized tests engender an educational environment in which the
only thing that matters is results. Consequently, school is seen as
little more than a race to the top.
One recent survey shows that 70 percent of high school students
have cheated on an exam at least once. Even more disturbing are the
numerous incidences in which teachers or administrators, fearing
the wrath of politicians bent on holding them
“accountable,” have given students the answers on
state-mandated standardized tests.
The truth is that there is no easy way to measure how well
schools are doing their jobs. And there is no easy way to measure a
broad and ambiguous term like “merit.” A brave
politician (if there is such a thing) would stop talking about
holding schools accountable and start talking about the flawed
systematic assumptions that hold students back from achieving their
full potential.
Intuitively, every educator knows this simple fact: learning is
not about jumping through hoops or passing a test that some
faceless institutional authority has decreed to be an effective,
objective measure of merit. At its core, education should be about
teaching students how to think for themselves, not how to do what
society tells them to do.
The truth is that there probably is no way to measure merit
objectively. We would do well to stop fooling ourselves and put an
end to this destructive culture of testing.