More comments on the anti-testing movement
Peter Wood has a delicious column today in the National Review about teacher's colleges who use a loophole to avoid accountability, and the rise of the Anti-Testing movement. The entire article is well worth the read, but I just have to quote selected passages here:
The General Accounting Office reported last week that it has uncovered a loophole in federal regulations aimed at holding teachers' colleges accountable for the quality of their programs. Since the passage of the Higher Education Amendments of 1998, teachers' colleges have been required to report the percentage of their graduates who pass their state teachers' examinations. Some teachers' colleges, however, dodge the rule by claiming that only those students who pass the exam are genuine graduates — and therefore report that 100 percent of their graduates pass...
...I don't mean to say that teachers' colleges are the only reason why our schools fall so short...But the teachers' colleges provide a kind of foundational badness that makes everything else worse...That some of these schools would like to flatter themselves and lie to the public by boasting of 100-percent passage rates on state teachers' examinations is no great surprise. They spend much of their time focused on educational procedure at the expense of substance; they make a fetish out of counting the uncountable and miscounting everything else...
It may not be amiss to suggest a wider context. The ed schools that are manipulating definitions of who is a graduate in order to claim 100-percent passage rates on state exams are yet another instance of what might be called the Anti-Testing movement, the effort by the Cultural Left to nullify all forms of objective evaluation. The Anti-Testing Movement has won key victories in undermining the SAT (see "The SAT Asterisk" and "Seeing Our Future") and is pressing ahead.
Anti-Testing is fueled by a combination of identity politics and simple-minded egalitarianism. The Anti-Testers often say they are not against tests per se, but only want "fair" tests. But their definition of "fair" is much like the ed school's definition of "graduate." What's fair, according to the Anti-Testers, is whatever produces the outcome they would like. Often what they have in mind is higher scores for African Americans and Hispanics, but the goal varies...
The egalitarian component of the Anti-Test argument usually takes the form of insisting that college admissions offices and other bodies should "take the whole person into account."...The purpose of standardized testing is precisely not to take the "whole person" into account, but to isolate and measure the handful of variables that bear most directly on whether a candidate is likely to succeed. Those variables are colorblind and indifferent to whether a candidate is disabled. The "whole person" approach, to the contrary, is a means of opening competitions to any and all kinds of manipulation....
Lying about graduation rates is only a small jump from lying about the SATs or demanding that college admissions be based on evaluations of each and every "whole person." These are all reflections of the Anti-Test Movement, which found its main line of argument in the no-objectivity-is-possible sophistry of recent years. Postmodernity is the philosophy that allows you to feel good about lying. And the ed schools are merely the caboose on the train of postmodernism.
Ahh, Mr. Wood's comments just make me feel good all over. Of course, I'm envious that he just expressed my exact viewpoint in a much more elegant way than I ever could have, but I relish his commentary nonetheless.