Richard Phelps, an acquaintance of mine who was very supportive when I began this blog, has finally brought his book, Kill the Messenger: The War on Standardized Testing, to fruition. It's been in the works for a few years, and I'm very happy to see that it's now out there for the general public.
Here's a review from Enter Stage Right:
A week doesn't go by, without a mainstream media story on the "horrors" of standardized testing, in which reporters tell of widespread testing error, of how testing is causing students to drop out of school, or of how testing is causing an epidemic of cheating.
Or how testing prevents teachers from actually teaching, or prevents students from actually learning, or from having any fun...but I digress.
The story behind the stories is that the relative prevalence of testing error is infinitesimal, that journalists stressing the dropout factor are mindlessly repeating a myth invented by radical Boston College teacher education professor Walter Haney, and that cheating is more easily prevented on standardized tests than with their alternatives.
For years, the American public has been force-fed a diet of test-bashing by the establishment media, the teachers' unions, professors of teacher education and well-financed anti-testing organizations, in which test-bashers have twisted existing data, ignored contrary data, and fabricated data outright. So reports Richard Phelps in his brilliant, new book, Kill the Messenger: The War on Standardized Testing...
Phelps argues persuasively that objective, external, standardized, high-stakes testing is the best measure we have of how much students have learned, and how well teachers, curricula, and textbooks have done their respective jobs. The tests give us a tremendous amount of information on children's academic strengths and weaknesses, so that we may help them improve. "Objective" is in contrast to classroom grades, which are increasingly subjective, politicized, and inflated. "External" means that school officials with a stake in the results do not control examination grading. "Standardized" means that a test "is given in identical form and at the same time to students in more than one school, and all the results are marked in the same way." And "high stakes" means that test scores have consequences, so that the test serves as a powerful motivational tool. Alternatives such as classroom grades and "portfolios" of work lack the advantages of standardized testing, while being much more vulnerable to manipulation and cheating.
Go forth and purchase. I've already ordered my copy. The book's already gotten 5 reviews on Amazon. Don't miss the comments from the reviewer who gave it only 1 star; she says virtually nothing about the book, choosing instead to relate her personal tale of woe because she didn't receive accommodated tests from some Texas universities:
Confusing rote obedience with intelligence, the authors selectively ignore cases (I and many others) that could not pass our state's standardized exams (now the political vogue) yet maintain a 4.0 average, ironically the mark of excellence. This is not an accident or misprint, but reflects a calculated war against anybody labeled different...
Unlike components for the general degree plan, the 'accommodations' option (regardless of how simple the provision such as a four function calculator, colored overlays etc...) for Texas's higher education testing program is not available at every state institution, wrongfully implying that disability is an 'extra', and reinforcing the idea students with disabilities are not 'real' members of the academic community. Once we are devalued, it is easier to justify overall discrimination against people with disabilities.
What does this have to do with Phelps' book, again?
Update: An archived version of Linda Seebach's review of the book for the Rocky Mountain Times can be found here. She neatly summarizes the motive behind the anti-testing bias so often seen in the media:
The unspoken difficulty with the SAT is not educational, it is political: namely, Asians and whites consistently score on average a couple of hundred points higher than blacks and Hispanics. And it isn't because the tests are biased, any more than scales are biased because they consistently show that men, on average, are heavier than women. Tests predict almost equally well for all races.
Nobody wants testing to reveal these differences, but nobody has any idea how to change them, either, so the only way out is to look for other excuses to lessen the importance of the SAT and other similar tests.
Posted by kswygert at March 15, 2004 04:17 PM