You know the old saying that if you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Many of the reform leaders went to elite colleges where admission was determined by test scores; they are really good at testing, and that is the perspective through which they view education. As they emphasize the importance of testing, they validate their own life story. Testing worked for them, it should work for everyone.
The problem, of course, is that norm-referenced tests are built on normal curves. Only a limited number can be on the top. Which is okay if you are among the best and brightest.
A reader comments:
The key to understanding the best and brightest mentality is to understand what it means to be a technocrat. The technocratic mindset feels at home in governmental, corporate, and foundation bureaucracies. We see it in extreme form wherever there is an unbalanced, half-brained thinking that works only with what it knows and understands already. It recruits the best and brightest, but filters out anyone who would challenge its narrowly defined assumptions. It seeks to dominate or destroy what it cannot control. It therefore sees the lively, eccentric, and unpredictable as a problem to be eliminated. It revels in the general, and is allergic to the concrete. It cares about the abstract and quantitative and regards the qualitative as soft, unmeasurable, and thus irrelevant. It lives within a rigid template of reality, in its own mirror world, and anything that doesn’t fit gets chopped off.
They see themselves as “impatient optimists” who develop elaborate and fundamentally wrongheaded, if not delusional, strategies to change the world for the better by some limited metric of their own contrivance, but too often create even bigger messes than the one they hoped to clean up. This is the mindset that supported, for idealistic reasons, the invasion of Iraq and is also the mindset that makes it impossible for those who have it to see that they were wrong. It’s the mindset of economists who believe in things like perfectly competitive markets and have a hard time understanding why reality won’t conform to their theories. Technocratic thinking starts with an abstraction, and then insists that the world conform to it, and if it won’t do it willingly it will use force.
And technocratic projects are always naively, if not cynically, “data driven”. Naive because technocrats don’t understand the limitations of the impoverished interpretive framework they use to find meaning in the data, and they don’t understand how irrational interests shape their supposedly rational methods. They are cynical when they know their interpretations of the data are arbitrary or manipulated to serve agendas other than to speak truthfully.Technocracies recruit people and who are Hi-IQ, and are very articulate. If they have risen to positions of leadership, they have displayed an aggressiveness and confidence in promoting the technocracy’s mission. They are the best and the brightest, they know better, and they are contemptuous of anyone who disagrees with them, especially if they are “soft” humanistic types who reject their basic assumptions
They have their arguments, and some of them are very clever if you accept their basic assumptions, but how do you talk to someone about an alternative vision that embraces the beauties of red and green and blue when they are colorblind and think that anybody who isn’t is crazy?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Tom Luna, Idaho Superintendent of Schools, earned his degree online from Thomas Edison State College.
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I guess he figures that if it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for everyone else. Besides the e-corps donated to his campaign fund.
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Hi Diane. Is there a way you could pass along the name of the individual who wrote the above comment? I would like to give them credit if I ever pass what s/he wrote along to others.
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I guess I have slightly more respect for him than for, say, Rahm Emanuel. At least what’s good enough for everyone else is what’s good enough for him (Luna). Emanuel sends his own kids to Lab Schools and then wants CPS schools run like military academies. Hypocrisy much?
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That “best and brightest” notion was an IRONICAL title by David Halberstam. Despite all of the elite background, the people in his book were NOT the “best and the brightest.” Good grief. It was about the Vietnam War, obviously not something pushed by the “best and the brightest.”
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But that was Halberstam’s point. It was “the best and brightest” that got us into the war because they were so arrogant that they didn’t listen to anyone but one another
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But people using the term these days don’t even SEE the irony of it.
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For those too young to know about the book, a summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_and_the_Brightest
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Norm-referenced tests are a measure of relative test performance, so it is possible that the top-scoring testers are not the best qualified for a specific profession if the measures are invalid. They are simply the best scorers and if they think test-mastery equates with inherent “brightness” then they are neither the best nor very bright.
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“. . . if the measures are invalid.”
Indeed they are invalid and any conclusions made from them are, as Wilson puts it, “vain and illusory”. Come join in on my discussion, “Promoting Just Education for All” found at revivingwilson.org, of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” in which he proves the invalidity of educational standards, standardized testing and grades/grading.
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There is a simpler explanation for why many otherwise liberal-leaning politicians and media figures support the corporate school reform agenda — that is, they (and their children) attended (attend) suburban or private schools, not low-SES-area/inner-city schools.
Suburban/private schools have problems, of course, but they are different — and much less serious — than the problems afflicting the low-SES-area schools. In the suburban/private schools, the occasional poorly-performing teacher is probably the problem most noted by parents, students, and other teachers. Similarly, the failure of the school to identify/remove these poorly-performing teachers is an on-going irritant routinely discussed by parents at suburban PTA meetings and while watching their kids’ youth sports teams. For people who attended these suburban/private schools (or whose children now attend these schools) and who draw from their personal experience in formulating school reform proposals, it makes perfect sense to emphaisze reforms that identify poorly-performing teachers and compel the discharge of the poorly-performing teachers as well as perhaps the discharge of the principal who has condoned the poorly-performing teachers.
Viewed from this perspective, high-stakes-testing (to identify/remove the poorly-performing teachers) as well as the weakening of tenure/due-process and teachers unions (to facilitate discharge of the identified poorly-performing teachers) is completely rational.
And, a main defect in high-stakes-testing — the many non-teacher-controlled variables impacting test scores — is not as applicable in the suburban/private schools where there are fewer “problem” students than in the low-SES-area schools and where the characteristics of the students in any given teacher’s classes or any given school are usually very similar to the characteristics of the students in the other classes or the other area schools.
In short, politicians and media folk endorse the corporate school reforms because those reforms are rationally connected to the problems these politicians and media folk remember from their own school experience (or the experience of their children) in the suburban/private schools.
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I don’t agree with this analysis. An extraordinary number of “reform” leaders attended elite private schools.
They seldom, if ever, took standardized tests, other than the SAT. They are really good at taking standardized tests. They believe in meritocracy because it worked for them.
Suburban parents in affluent districts are not a bit happy with the emphasis on standardized tests. Think about the film “Race to Nowhere.” Most think their kids are the best, but the standardized tests don’t necessarily affirm the parents’ view. Some affluent districts, like Scarsdale, loathe standardized testing.
You really should be thinking Exeter, Andover, Deerfield Academy, Lakeside Academy, Sidwell Friends, Maumee Valley Country Day School, and other elite institutions as the seedbeds of the “reform” philosophy.
That’s where people feel keenly about applying solutions to “other people’s children” that would not work for their own.
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I valued standardized test, at least if you also include AP exams, because it gave my oldest son a chance to demonstrate his academic abilities independent of grades received in his classes.
In the interest of transparency I should also say that my mother attended one of the schools on the schools on Dr. Ravitch’s list (though did not get a college degree as that was thought to be unnecessary by her step father), and my wife attended another school on Dr. Ravitch’s list for a year as a scholarship student after she graduated from her terrible rural public school district.
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Speaking to my upper-middle-class suburban (mostly liberal/Democratic) friends, almost all of them (unless they themselves taught in low-SES-area schools) think that a major problem with US schools is poorly-performing teachers and that high-stakes testing is a reasonable way to identify/remove these poorly-performing teachers. When I argue with them regarding high-stakes testing, they invariably cite poorly-performing teachers that they (or their children) have had in suburban schools and how the administrators condoned these teachers. Just anecdotal evidence, but it explains why these well-educated otherwise liberal voters so easily support the high-stakes-testing reforms.
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Once again I am impressed by your analysis. It rings true to me, and is more believable than the sort of conspiracy theory explanations often offered here.
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This is completely anecdotal, but my sense as a mom living in an archetypal, well-funded, solidly middle-class, suburban district is that even the most politically naive parents in my neighborhood understand on some level that passing their middle-class privilege on to their children is going to be be a challenge (that might not be as issue in Scarsdale but few places are as privileged as Scardale, and we certainly aren’t). The parents around here are very anxious about their children succeeding and there is tremendous pressure on the kids, especially as they enter their high school years, to perform.
As a result, the parents don’t think badly about the tests. They see them as a necessary hurdle, not any different than SATs (yes, there are lots of criticisms you could make about the SATs but like it or not, most people think they are important and meaningful). They are glad to have their child collect another high score. The parents may also be comfortable with the idea of testing because many of them around here are “Technocrats” in one professional field or another and so the language used by the reform leaders resonates with them.
And suburban districts do teach to the test. Maybe not at the accelerated/honors level, but my kid is very average and at his “academic grouping” or “pathway” or whatever euphenmism you want to use, there is some teaching to the test. I see it in the schoolwork; it’s hard to miss when every week’s lessons include one that is titled “OAA prep” (IIRC, that stands for Ohio Achievement Assessment), or when every teacher during Curriculum Preview night, no matter what the school or grade, assures us parents that she is going to make sure “Your kids will be well-prepared for The Test.”
It’s been a big disappointment to me. Years ago, when I first started this segment of my life as a suburban mom, and I saw what powerhouses the PTA leaders were, I thought, “Wow, when these PTA Moms get a hold of what’s coming down the pike to our schools, Watch OUT!” But even after all these years they still don’t see the threat the school “reforms” pose to us. Most people choose the suburbs to be in a cocoon and they don’t want to see past that cocoon, I guess.
I will say, Labor Lawyer’s description of the “on-going irritant (of the ocassional not up to suburban-snuff teacher being) routinely discussed by parents at suburban PTA meetings and while watching their kids’ youth sports teams” is spot on. Except he left out the conversations that occur at chance meetings while on line at Starbucks.
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I thought he was describing the demand for testing and the leadership, the origins and causes. Suburban moms are recipients of policies they did not create.
Diane
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I think Labor Lawyer might have misidentified the source of the demands for testing and its leadership but I think he did hit on something, which is that parents in the suburbs should hate the reforms as much as anyone else but most of us seem to not mind or even welcome them. I hope Scarsdale is a sign that that might change but I’m not seeing that where I live, that’s all.
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My own experience, as a parent in a high-test score, supposedly good suburban school district in California, is similar to Barbara’s. I have found myself a pariah on the PTA for trying to get parents even to acknowledge that 75% of what goes on in our elementary schools is test prep. Nor have I felt loved for for suggesting in forum after forum that a curriculum in which K-5 students fill in bubbles every day is an unworthy one. I think that for many, the impulse to measure simply and to quantify is strong, while the desire to probe beneath the misleading veneer of the resulting numbers is less so.
For my own part, having taught in higher education, I disdain multiple choice. You have to have students write and speak and organize material if you want to get a sense of what they know and what they’ve learned. And having seen the quality of the bubble-in questions my son brings home, I don’t understand why more people aren’t appalled.
So yes, it’s forced from on high, but I think it’s far too readily accepted as well.
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They tend to be math whizzes. The trouble is that in predicting human behavior math is not so good. In fact it is not so good at predicting anything. If it were we would all be millionaires (without cheating and stealing, like the current Wall Streeters). The SAT is not predictive of anything. See also the recent NY Sunday Times article about predicting the weather. The slightest variable can throw everything off.
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The only thing the SAT “measures” is preparation for college. So if I don’t do well on that math portion, that doesn’t mean I am stupid or I will fail in college; it just means I haven’t taken enough math courses to do well on the test.
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“Testing worked for them, it should work for everyone.”
Ahh … The “power of self love” … Ironically, I heard this from David Coleman.
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Ahhh. The best and the brightest! What does that make the others? The not so great and dumbest??? Or maybe some of them are the talented and unique. I am sure many of us could come up with some other descriptors for the many students whom we teach. That’s because we understand that it is not only the straight A students who make this such an interesting world to live. We know that each student has some unique talent that has a place in society. The artists, musicians, athletes, caregivers, carpenters, etc. all have important roles in our society. The problem is that for too long now we have placed high GPAs as the end all and be all of education. Just look at what those best and brightest have done to our economy and political system. A well rounded student who is prepared to participate as a productive citizen should be our education goal.
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Diane, I have to take issue with this sweeping generalization. You quote:
“Many of the reform leaders went to elite colleges where admission was determined by test scores; they are really good at testing, and that is the perspective through which they view education. As they emphasize the importance of testing, they validate their own life story. Testing worked for them, it should work for everyone.”
Well, I want you and your readers to know that this education reformer was NOT admitted to an elite college because of test scores! When I mentor young people and talk about my alma mater, I tell them the story of a student-athlete who was at the top of his class and was being recruited by elite schools. However, he was NOT a good standardized test-taker. A coach called him and told him that his SAT scores were not going to get him into the program he wanted, and that he should consider applying into the liberal arts program and transfer into the program he wanted after his sophomore year. So this student told the coach that if his entire body of work and leadership activities were not good enough for the school, he would take his services elsewhere. AND HE GOT ADMITTED!
What is the moral of the story? The moral of the story is that while SAT scores may be “over-weighted” by some schools’ admission departments, there are some universities that look at the entire picture. And PLEASE, I gratefully request that you not make sweeping assumptions that all education reformers, or event most of them, are advocating for more high stakes testing. While I may disagree with you on many education policy issues, it would be incorrect for you to assume that I advocate for more testing. Testing should be used as one very small component in evaluating a child’s academic aptitude, as well as a comparative benchmark. And it depends on how the assessment was given. For example, multiple choice testing tells us NOTHING, except that a student can memorize facts without context.
When both sides of the issue start negotiating around interests, not positions, maybe we will be able to agree on a comprehensive teacher and student evaluation formula.
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