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I identified this abuse in an NRO column in July 2001 (See "Hammer the Hammer"). Nice to know that somebody in the GAO is reading. Cornelia M. Ashby, the GAO official who presented the report to the House Subcommittee on 21st Century Competitiveness, actually has a talent for mordant understatement. Noting the 100-percent passage rate, Ms. Ashby observed, "This practice reduces accountability." Oh, really? The particular form of corruption that the GAO report documents is, of course, small change in an era dominated by much larger scandals. Still, it is worth thinking about. American public schools are, by and large, not very good. Every few years, we shake ourselves awake and focus on school reform for a while and then, finding the problem intractable, turn our attention elsewhere. But a major reason that the problem is intractable is that most teachers come into the profession via schools of education that have low admissions standards, hapless faculty members, vapid curricula, and no real accountability. I don't mean to say that teachers' colleges are the only reason why our schools fall so short. We have plenty of other problems: over-diagnosed learning disabilities, dumbed-down textbooks, counter-productive bilingual education programs, teachers' unions that care more about their members' privileges than the education of children, the edu-unions hammerlock on the Democratic party, and more. But the teachers' colleges provide a kind of foundational badness that makes everything else worse. No doubt that doesn't apply to every teachers' college. I know education faculty members who are well-read, intelligent people; I know ed-school graduates who have survived the journey and shrug off the intellectual nonsense that is the day-to-day fare of teachers' education. I know of teachers' colleges that acknowledge the problem and that defy the industry by holding themselves to high standards. These, however, are the exceptions. Teacher education as a whole comprises the Baltic and Mediterranean Avenues of American higher education: the low rent monopoly, just barely past GO. 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; they lavish effort on finding ways to turn Leftist slogans and catchphrases into lesson plans and "teachable moments." The dishonesty that pervades life inside the ed schools is bound to be reflected in their responses to the public's demand for a clear reckoning of their performance. The GAO report on ed-school chicanery is appropriately focused on one abuse, but 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 disability advocate groups that have persuaded the College Board not to disclose the extra time given to some disabled test takers are race-blind. But race critics and disability advocates are alike in their determination to impede the use of standard measures that look objectively and neutrally at evidence of actual performance. 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 idea is that test scores only measure a few limited dimensions of a person, but that there are other important dimensions that should also be considered, such as "life experience" and "ambition." This argument has genuine appeal because we all feel that we are more than the sum of our test results. But it is, of course, a mostly demagogic appeal. The "whole person" is not measurable or even knowable within the context of college admissions, and the phrase is really an effort to slip racial and other identity group classifications back into the process of deciding who gets admitted to college. 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. How is it that people who have committed their professional lives to education can work their way around to espousing a view that undermining standardized tests is a step toward "fairness"? Higher education drank deeply from the well of postmodernism in the 1980s and 1990s. At first it was only very sophisticated thinkers who got their minds around the idea that "objectivity" is impossible and that knowledge that purports to be objective is only a disguise for powerful conservative interests in society. But the trail from Marcuse to Foucault gradually broadened. "Radical" educational theorists such as Henry Giroux helped to make the idea accessible and exciting to the dimmer lights of the educationists. At this point, it is difficult to find a graduate student in the humanities or the social sciences who doesn't smile disdainfully at the quaint notion of "objectivity." Postmodernism itself is somewhat passé, but it has left its essential legacy. No intellectual wishes to be accused of naïveté and that requires showing that you understand that things like standardized tests are rife with assumptions that serve the powerful in maintaining their dominance. Reduced to its crudest form, this postmodernist cliché is a version of "might makes right." And its crudest form is about all that some of the denizens of schools of education are capable of taking in. 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. — Peter W. Wood is an associate professor of anthropology at Boston University. |
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he 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.
