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Stop High-Stakes Testing: An Appeal to America's Conscience
Stop High-Stakes An Appeal to America's Conscience is a compelling indictment of the use of high-stakes assessments with punitive consequences in our public schools. The authors trace the history of the policy and document the inequities for children of poverty that undergird high-stakes testing practices. Lack of dental and medical care, environmental violence, insufficient school funding, racism, and classism—all factors that contribute to this dire situation—are discussed in depth. The authors make a convincing case for discontinuing the unjust testing that has been forced on our nation's public school children.
- GenresEducation
192 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
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January 5, 2017
This is a heart-breaking book. It is a book that documents a crime against humanity for which we all bear responsibility. Although this book is set in the United States, its lessons are equally relevant to any nation where racism is institutionalised, where resources are directed away from the poor and jealously concentrated and guarded by the more well-off. It is a book that shames, enrages, and demands action.
This book is a vision of Australia’s future. We too have started down the neo-liberal path of high-stakes testing and ‘accountability’ described so horrifyingly here. The irony is that if you look at PISA results (Program for International Student Assessment – or as a lecturer referred to it recently, Pray for Improved Scores for America) the US and UK (the countries we are trying to emulate in following them down the path of high-stakes testing) invariably come at the bottom of these rankings. Australia comes somewhere in the middle and countries like Finland and South Korea come at the top. You would think we would be looking to Finland if we were planning on copying anyone, but rather we look to the US and UK. The fundamental universal truth is that ideology is normative, rather than rational and so finds its own ‘evidence’.
Societies that are premised on gross inequities – such as the US, UK and Australia – also seem well equipped to find ways to continue their caste systems. In the US this is greatly simplified – as is tragically detailed in this book – by also being colour coded. The treatment of black children by the US education system is horrifying, it is one step up from Apartheid. The book sketches the history of black oppression in the world’s richest nation. It is a story of sickening cruelty. But what is worse is that it continues until today. Institutional racism ensures that de facto segregation has been able to take over where the Jim Crow laws left off. Sunset towns, although no longer as openly blatantly advertised as they once were, still effectively exist in the ‘gated communities’ of Middle America.
Do you doubt there is institutionalised racism in the United States? Perhaps you think there can’t be given there is a black President? What about this: “Bennett (former U.S. Secretary of Education) said, ‘But I do know, that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down’.” You can hear him saying this here: http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/20050928...
Perhaps the other way to make the crime rate go down would be to do something to reverse the inequities that we find in statistics like these:
“There generally are fewer library books available to poor and minority children. An alternative high school in Brooklyn that serves 200 students has no school library, and there are no textbooks. Rothstein cites a Philadelphia public library survey that revealed that in wealthy neighbourhoods there were ‘six times as many juvenile’ books than in public libraries in black neighbourhoods. Furthermore, retail stores stocked ‘1,300 children’s books per 100 children’ in college-educated neighbourhoods verses ’10 books per 100 children’ in multiethnic neighbourhoods and ‘fewer than one book per 100 children’ in a black neighbourhood.”
If you are black in America you are more likely to live in poverty, to work for minimum wages, to live without health insurance, to live in a violent neighbourhood, to have poor health, to be obese and have poor teeth, to die in your first year of life or to die 20-25 percent younger than if you were white. In Australia the same is true if you are Aboriginal – but at least we have a campaign to ‘close the gap’, even as generally ineffective as that is proving to be. With high-stakes testing it is almost as if the US had a policy to widen the gap.
I didn’t realise that the US education system was mostly funded by taxes on property. This means that affluent locations have an abundance of riches with which they can lavish on their schools – thus using their financial capital to concentrate the advantage their children derive from the social capital of the neighbourhood they live and so ensure academic success. This also means those in poor areas become doubly deprived. No resources at home compounded with no resources at school. What Galbraith referred to as private affluence amidst public squalor.
And what should we do once we have hog-tied a poor child? Well, the best thing is to completely break their spirit as early as possible and the best way to do this is to force them to take a test they are bound to fail, the same test their wealthy, highly-resourced and comfortable fellow students elsewhere take. This ought to remind them that they are worthless and to help them to learn their place. Who needs the Ku Klux Klan when you can dump minority kids into classrooms where there is, “Snow on classroom bookshelves in a room not warm enough to melt it.” In classrooms infested by rats and cockroaches, or this jaw-dropper:
“In Cleveland, a closed school in a dangerous neighbourhood was reopened for elementary pupils because their elementary school’s roof was ‘close to collapsing’. Parents were worried about their children attending the reopened school because of gun violence in the neighbourhood. Despite the children’s situation and the disruptions caused by relocating to such a school, Okoben notes, ‘Losing at least eight days of instruction is a concern, especially with state proficiency tests looming in March.”
Perhaps, if there was some evidence that these kinds of tests actually did something positive, but there has been no such evidence. In fact, all of the evidence is that such testing is essentially a punishment for being poor. If you are poor you will not have the resources to adequately perform at school. This is because much of what happens at school is completely different from your home environment. At home your parents are likely to either be working a couple of jobs to try to make ends meet or ill or drug affected or possibly even violent. The rates of all of these are greatly increased by belonging to the ‘excluded’ classes. To succeed you will need your school to provide you with ‘extra’ resources to overcome the disadvantages you already face. But instead you will be given less of everything.
Statistically, these tests are a sham. As a New York Schools Counsellor said, “The error measurement on the ELA (English Language Arts) test could lead to a swing of plus or minus 10,000 children failing the test and being ‘flunked’ to repeat grade three.”
The tests you take are called ‘high-stakes’ because that is what they are. If you fail then you can expect to stay down a year. If enough of you at your school fail, your school will face consequences, such as reduced funding or closure. This is the greatest ‘punish the poor’ policy imaginable. It is tragic and pitiful and makes me furious. For this is where my education system is also heading.
The fact that there are such high consequences for failure means schools put unbelievable pressure on tiny children – stealing from them any hope of their enjoying school. And these tests literally make kids sick. As one father said:
“My son is about to take the fourth-grade ELA exams this week. He has experienced extreme anxiety, vomiting, diarrhoea, and has been unable to sleep in his own bed for the last three days. It’s breaking my heart. He wants to do so well. A nine-year-old should not be subjected to this. No Child Left Behind is not a remedy, it’s a horror for our children. How can I help to ensure that other children are not subjected to this kind of gross anxiety?”
Worse than this is the fact that because there are such terrible punishments for not getting a good score in these virtually meaningless tests, schools narrow the curriculum (in poor areas, anyway) and only teach maths and reading (the only subjects assessed). This creates a generation of kids who will know nothing but how to complete (increasingly badly) a standardised testing form. What a remarkably practical skill for the twenty-first century.
This book is not like other books I have read on this subject. It discusses the history of inequity and racism in the United States and how this history has contributed to the current situation. This is necessary as far too often we are shown facts and figures about the current situation, but with no context. And without context the present situation is open to being blamed on the inadequacies and failings of the victims of the present system. Just listen to what these well-off children have to say:
“Our respondents were asked, ‘Why are people poor?’ ‘What causes poverty?’ Responses from middle- and upper-class students include:
Jake, seventh grader: Because they make poor decisions. They often come from bad or broken homes. A lot of the time they are lazy.
Samantha, fifth grader: People are poor because they don’t work hard enough to make money.”
Such views are given to these kids with their baby-milk. If you live in a caste system that systematically excludes millions from hope of achievement, you need to be able to find ways to blame those you deny for their own failure, or you yourself will feel shame and self-loathing. But for poor children the biggest mistake they have ever made was to ‘choose’ to be born to poor families, to ‘choose’ to be born black. And we have created a system that virtually ensures they will pay for that poor ‘choice’ with the rest of their lives.
The main problem with No Child Left Behind, with high-stakes testing, is that it is a mindlessly simple solution, imposed by people outside of the education system that produces a single number to be used to judge the effectiveness of the entire system. How could it be anything other than a complete failure? Here in Australia we have the My School website – based on much of the same ideological madness – and set to have much the same devastating effect on our already grossly inequitable school system.
But it could be different. It is, in fact, different in so many other countries. It is just that this is not something easy to fix. This is something that would, if we had the compassion and the will, take years to address. In our heart of hearts we know that poor people ought to be given ‘corrective justice’ – and that this does not mean just additional resources, but much, much more than that. We would need to redirect money away from tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy and give the poor wages that are ‘living-wages’ in more than just name. We would make Teaching a ‘profession’ in which highly trained and competent experts are trusted to do what they became teachers for in the first place – not to read ‘education scripts’, but to help kids develop a love of learning.
We all know that there is a direct correlation between how wealthy your parents are and how well you are likely to do at school. While we live in societies that provide so much to wealthy children while taking away what little there is from the poor we are all responsible for the hardship we are helping to cause.
If we had any shame at all we would scream this injustice from the rooftops. While we remain silent we are to blame.
This book is a vision of Australia’s future. We too have started down the neo-liberal path of high-stakes testing and ‘accountability’ described so horrifyingly here. The irony is that if you look at PISA results (Program for International Student Assessment – or as a lecturer referred to it recently, Pray for Improved Scores for America) the US and UK (the countries we are trying to emulate in following them down the path of high-stakes testing) invariably come at the bottom of these rankings. Australia comes somewhere in the middle and countries like Finland and South Korea come at the top. You would think we would be looking to Finland if we were planning on copying anyone, but rather we look to the US and UK. The fundamental universal truth is that ideology is normative, rather than rational and so finds its own ‘evidence’.
Societies that are premised on gross inequities – such as the US, UK and Australia – also seem well equipped to find ways to continue their caste systems. In the US this is greatly simplified – as is tragically detailed in this book – by also being colour coded. The treatment of black children by the US education system is horrifying, it is one step up from Apartheid. The book sketches the history of black oppression in the world’s richest nation. It is a story of sickening cruelty. But what is worse is that it continues until today. Institutional racism ensures that de facto segregation has been able to take over where the Jim Crow laws left off. Sunset towns, although no longer as openly blatantly advertised as they once were, still effectively exist in the ‘gated communities’ of Middle America.
Do you doubt there is institutionalised racism in the United States? Perhaps you think there can’t be given there is a black President? What about this: “Bennett (former U.S. Secretary of Education) said, ‘But I do know, that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down’.” You can hear him saying this here: http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/20050928...
Perhaps the other way to make the crime rate go down would be to do something to reverse the inequities that we find in statistics like these:
“There generally are fewer library books available to poor and minority children. An alternative high school in Brooklyn that serves 200 students has no school library, and there are no textbooks. Rothstein cites a Philadelphia public library survey that revealed that in wealthy neighbourhoods there were ‘six times as many juvenile’ books than in public libraries in black neighbourhoods. Furthermore, retail stores stocked ‘1,300 children’s books per 100 children’ in college-educated neighbourhoods verses ’10 books per 100 children’ in multiethnic neighbourhoods and ‘fewer than one book per 100 children’ in a black neighbourhood.”
If you are black in America you are more likely to live in poverty, to work for minimum wages, to live without health insurance, to live in a violent neighbourhood, to have poor health, to be obese and have poor teeth, to die in your first year of life or to die 20-25 percent younger than if you were white. In Australia the same is true if you are Aboriginal – but at least we have a campaign to ‘close the gap’, even as generally ineffective as that is proving to be. With high-stakes testing it is almost as if the US had a policy to widen the gap.
I didn’t realise that the US education system was mostly funded by taxes on property. This means that affluent locations have an abundance of riches with which they can lavish on their schools – thus using their financial capital to concentrate the advantage their children derive from the social capital of the neighbourhood they live and so ensure academic success. This also means those in poor areas become doubly deprived. No resources at home compounded with no resources at school. What Galbraith referred to as private affluence amidst public squalor.
And what should we do once we have hog-tied a poor child? Well, the best thing is to completely break their spirit as early as possible and the best way to do this is to force them to take a test they are bound to fail, the same test their wealthy, highly-resourced and comfortable fellow students elsewhere take. This ought to remind them that they are worthless and to help them to learn their place. Who needs the Ku Klux Klan when you can dump minority kids into classrooms where there is, “Snow on classroom bookshelves in a room not warm enough to melt it.” In classrooms infested by rats and cockroaches, or this jaw-dropper:
“In Cleveland, a closed school in a dangerous neighbourhood was reopened for elementary pupils because their elementary school’s roof was ‘close to collapsing’. Parents were worried about their children attending the reopened school because of gun violence in the neighbourhood. Despite the children’s situation and the disruptions caused by relocating to such a school, Okoben notes, ‘Losing at least eight days of instruction is a concern, especially with state proficiency tests looming in March.”
Perhaps, if there was some evidence that these kinds of tests actually did something positive, but there has been no such evidence. In fact, all of the evidence is that such testing is essentially a punishment for being poor. If you are poor you will not have the resources to adequately perform at school. This is because much of what happens at school is completely different from your home environment. At home your parents are likely to either be working a couple of jobs to try to make ends meet or ill or drug affected or possibly even violent. The rates of all of these are greatly increased by belonging to the ‘excluded’ classes. To succeed you will need your school to provide you with ‘extra’ resources to overcome the disadvantages you already face. But instead you will be given less of everything.
Statistically, these tests are a sham. As a New York Schools Counsellor said, “The error measurement on the ELA (English Language Arts) test could lead to a swing of plus or minus 10,000 children failing the test and being ‘flunked’ to repeat grade three.”
The tests you take are called ‘high-stakes’ because that is what they are. If you fail then you can expect to stay down a year. If enough of you at your school fail, your school will face consequences, such as reduced funding or closure. This is the greatest ‘punish the poor’ policy imaginable. It is tragic and pitiful and makes me furious. For this is where my education system is also heading.
The fact that there are such high consequences for failure means schools put unbelievable pressure on tiny children – stealing from them any hope of their enjoying school. And these tests literally make kids sick. As one father said:
“My son is about to take the fourth-grade ELA exams this week. He has experienced extreme anxiety, vomiting, diarrhoea, and has been unable to sleep in his own bed for the last three days. It’s breaking my heart. He wants to do so well. A nine-year-old should not be subjected to this. No Child Left Behind is not a remedy, it’s a horror for our children. How can I help to ensure that other children are not subjected to this kind of gross anxiety?”
Worse than this is the fact that because there are such terrible punishments for not getting a good score in these virtually meaningless tests, schools narrow the curriculum (in poor areas, anyway) and only teach maths and reading (the only subjects assessed). This creates a generation of kids who will know nothing but how to complete (increasingly badly) a standardised testing form. What a remarkably practical skill for the twenty-first century.
This book is not like other books I have read on this subject. It discusses the history of inequity and racism in the United States and how this history has contributed to the current situation. This is necessary as far too often we are shown facts and figures about the current situation, but with no context. And without context the present situation is open to being blamed on the inadequacies and failings of the victims of the present system. Just listen to what these well-off children have to say:
“Our respondents were asked, ‘Why are people poor?’ ‘What causes poverty?’ Responses from middle- and upper-class students include:
Jake, seventh grader: Because they make poor decisions. They often come from bad or broken homes. A lot of the time they are lazy.
Samantha, fifth grader: People are poor because they don’t work hard enough to make money.”
Such views are given to these kids with their baby-milk. If you live in a caste system that systematically excludes millions from hope of achievement, you need to be able to find ways to blame those you deny for their own failure, or you yourself will feel shame and self-loathing. But for poor children the biggest mistake they have ever made was to ‘choose’ to be born to poor families, to ‘choose’ to be born black. And we have created a system that virtually ensures they will pay for that poor ‘choice’ with the rest of their lives.
The main problem with No Child Left Behind, with high-stakes testing, is that it is a mindlessly simple solution, imposed by people outside of the education system that produces a single number to be used to judge the effectiveness of the entire system. How could it be anything other than a complete failure? Here in Australia we have the My School website – based on much of the same ideological madness – and set to have much the same devastating effect on our already grossly inequitable school system.
But it could be different. It is, in fact, different in so many other countries. It is just that this is not something easy to fix. This is something that would, if we had the compassion and the will, take years to address. In our heart of hearts we know that poor people ought to be given ‘corrective justice’ – and that this does not mean just additional resources, but much, much more than that. We would need to redirect money away from tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy and give the poor wages that are ‘living-wages’ in more than just name. We would make Teaching a ‘profession’ in which highly trained and competent experts are trusted to do what they became teachers for in the first place – not to read ‘education scripts’, but to help kids develop a love of learning.
We all know that there is a direct correlation between how wealthy your parents are and how well you are likely to do at school. While we live in societies that provide so much to wealthy children while taking away what little there is from the poor we are all responsible for the hardship we are helping to cause.
If we had any shame at all we would scream this injustice from the rooftops. While we remain silent we are to blame.
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