A worthy opponent
Jay Mathews has discovered a rare individual indeed - a testing critic who relies on data, experience, and logical arguments, instead of the hysteria, hyperbole, ad hominem attacks, and non-existent or misinterpreted research that make up the usual "arguments" of such critics. As Jay Mathews, who is himself pro-testing, puts it, "No more cheap victories for us."
The movement against standardized testing has finally found a champion who cannot be dismissed as a country club obstructionist. She is Deborah Meier, a fierce opponent of standardized tests who is also founder of the Central Park East School in East Harlem, co-principal of the Mission Hill School in Boston, and one of the most knowledgeable and innovative inner city educators the country has ever seen...
Meier reduced our trust of ordinary teachers by raising our expectations. With a few other rebel teachers and administrators, she created small, intimate learning communities for Harlem kids and succeeded in preparing large numbers of them for college. She joined with the Annenberg Institute for School Reform to bring the idea to several other New York schools, and helped start a revolution in small urban schools that--with a big new dose of money from computer magnate Bill Gates--is changing education in several cities...
She starts with the fairest and most accurate summary of the standards movement ever written by a critic of standardized testing: "It's built around the idea that the villain is mostly low expectations and a failure of will power. Since both are indisputably factors in failure and less onerous to tackle than poverty, for example, this notion eliminates victimology..."But the trouble is, as we keep relearning generation after generation, it contradicts what we know about how human beings learn and what tests can and cannot do. That a standardized one-size-fits-all test could be invented and imposed by the state, that teachers could unashamedly teach to such a test, that all kids could theoretically succeed at this test, and that it could be true to any form of serious intellectual and/or technical psychometric standards is just plain undoable.
Jay Mathews actually called Ms. Meier up to question her further on her arguments, which center on the idea that the ideal way to teach inner-city kids is to use the graduate school model - in small seminar classes that focus on writing, debate, and research. Assessment would be via independent panels who examine the each child's written work and administer a face-to-face, hour-long oral exam. Jay found Ms. Meiers to be honest, enthusiastic, experienced, fiercely devoted to children, and with a sense of humor and perspective about her work and her ideas. All of which places her head and shoulders above the usual testing critics, and I'm glad to see that she's out stirring up the hornet's nest.
This is not to say I agree with her ideas, of course. Yes, it would be ideal if children could be taught in graduate school formats, but how practical or affordable is that? What's more, the graduate school format works in part because every student in the room is committed to learning and has reached a certain level of dedication and accomplishment (and is paying their own way). I think that children of vastly different potentials may find it frustrating to be in very small classes with each other, unless you plan to track by ability, which is all it takes to get some "equity is everything" pedagogues fired up.
What's more, the intense subjectivity of Ms. Meier's proposed exams is what standardized tests were intended to counteract. The independence of the panels is a step towards preserving objectivity, but the end result is that the grade in the class would be based on a face-to-face test. It would be very difficult to prove that some unscholastic attribute of the child - such as race, sex, accent, speaking style, or level of enthusiasm and extroversion - was not taken into account when the grade was assigned. Some people, like me, consider this one step back towards the old methods of grading and admissions, when you had to please the teacher or the grader - and be the "right" color, sex, or religion - in order to get a decent grade.
In the field of psychometric research surrounding performance assessment (which is the technical term for the kind of of assessment Ms. Meier is referring to), it is accepted that even anonymous essays should be assessed for rater bias, because it's possible that the rater may have guessed the essay-writer's sex or ethnicity, and their rating is assumed to be affected by that knowledge. Certainly, then, these "independent panels" would need to assure the public that they are not letting any factors about the child other than scholastic performance affect the child's grade, and that seems like a very difficult task.