Bush’s Education Problem
Why achievement tests won’t work.

By Jim Boulet Jr., executive director, English First.
April 2, 2001 8:45 a.m.

eam 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.