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Bush strongly believes that mandatory achievement tests will fix
America's public schools. Bush
education adviser
Chester Finn Jr. told The Weekly Standard that “the president's
people have hinted that, at the end of the day, testing is the only
part of their many-splendored education program that they will die
for.”
Unfortunately,
thanks to teachers' union lobbyists, bilingual-education fanatics,
and radical social engineers, achievement testing is no longer worth
dying for. Achievement testing might not even be worth catching
a slight head cold for.
Too many folks
in high places believe that if even one individual fails to meet
any objective standard, the standard must be unfair.
Civil-rights
activists once risked their lives to conduct Freedom Schools to
increase literacy. Now civil-rights activists insist that to require
any voter to be able to read his own ballot may be an illegal literacy
test.
Lani Guinier,
who was nominated for a high government post under Bill Clinton,
has actually
recommended pictorial ballots in order to protect the voting
rights of the illiterate:
Many
poor people are also less literate; for them time limits and complex
ballots proved disabling when the menu of candidates was organized
around lists of individuals rather than easily identified icons
for political parties [emphasis added].
Not suprisingly,
Guinier and her allies think precious little of all
standardized tests:
The
present system measures merit through scores on paper-and-pencil
tests. But this measure is fundamentally unfair. . . .[I]t is neither
fair nor functional in its distribution of opportunities for admission
to higher education, entry-level hiring and job promotion.
They recommend
that “complex, interactive, and holistic approaches to measuring
both institutional and individual performance” be developed, such
as “portfolio-based assessment.”
Those familiar
with education trends are discouragingly familiar with portfolio-based
assessment. As Charles Sykes reports in Dumbing Down Our Kids:
As
a system of reliable measurement and accountability, portfolios
are essentially useless in practice. Such assessments are, however,
perfectly designed for a system in which there is no fixed or objective
educational standard.
Elimination
of all fixed standards is precisely the goal of some highly-regarded
education "experts." Deborah
Meier recommends schools evaluate student portfolios since:
In
a democracy, there are multiple, legitimate definitions of “a good
education” and “well-educated” . . . Standardized tests are too
simple and simple-minded for high stakes assessment of children
and schools.
Some schools
have even managed to set more ethereal standards still. The Park
Ridge, Ill. school board earned praise from New York Times
education writer Richard Rothstein because they now teach sixth
graders lessons in anger management and patience.
Grading student
essays about “quarrels they had experienced” has another advantage.
No one will know what exactly these students have actually learned
until many years later: “Whether students in later life join Oprah's
Book Club is a better indication of middle school reading instruction
than how they interpreted test passages at age 11.”
President
Bush's education advisers may not be aware that the Department of
Education's Office of Civil Rights under Norma Cantu, attempted
to preempt his standardized test proposal last December via
The Use of Tests as Part of High-Stakes Decision-Making for Students.
The best OCR
could
say about large-scale standardized tests in is that “their use
is not inconsistent with federal nondiscrimination laws.” OCR went
on to suggest that discrimination laws could be invoked against
any standardized test:
When
tests are used in ways which profoundly shape the lives of students,
they must also be used in ways that accurately reflect educational
standards and that do not deny opportunities or benefits based on
their race, national origin (including limited English proficiency),
sex or disability.
Some folks
go further still. The Puerto Rican-rights group, ASPIRA, held a
conference last December devoted to its complaint that English-language
educational software discriminates against “students whose native
language is not English.”
Thankfully,
President Bush recently
suggested a willingness to take a second look at his standardized-test
plan. Conservatives can only hope he takes a third look and a fourth
if need be. There is simply no workable way for the federal government
to mandate any sort of true test of student knowledge.
Any government-required
test will soon be demolished by those who believe all knowledge
is relative and that speaking English is unnecessary. By the time
such folks finish making such an achievement test "fair," every
test-taker will receive an above-average score. Such tests will
show no child has been left behind, even if high-school graduates
must vote by pointing to a picture.
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