Education Policy & Subject Matter Gone Astray

On all levels our education policy is lacking consistency and effectiveness. We have turned to a policy of standardized testing as the sole determinant regarding what is taught. In Indiana we have the ISTEP. In Massachusetts it's the MCAS. In other states they use some other acronym for their version of standardized testing. None of these tests have proven themselves effective in predicting the success of a student, guaranteeing a proper education or improving the quality of education being offered. By the No Child Left Behind law requires such testing to be implemented and used as the primary--and often the only--criteria to determine whether a school district is succeeding at educating its charges.

The problem that anyone with experience in developing standardized testing can tell you is that life is not standardized. No industry can be defined by a series of test items and a standardized test score. Even the so-called achievement tests that were used in the 1950s through the late 1970s were really effective. While I advocate the use of standardized and ad hoc testing as part of the overall assessment process, I argue we need to use these tests as diagnostic tools to identify strengths and weaknesses for individual students, and trends in our overall approach to the curriculum within a school district. Using these tests as the sole determination as to whether a student passes a curriculum or whether a school is effective in its teaching is ludicrous and ridiculous.

The fact is that we have an overall national dropout rate that ranges between 30% and 35%. Over 60% of our students cannot identify geo-political areas of the world or our own nation. Students are not being provided with meaningful curricular choices in our schools and the failure begins at the earliest stages of our education system. We only offer early education and intervention services to the most neediest of cases even though we have identified that early intervention and equal access to early educational opportunities are directly linked to educational success. We place billions of dollars in the hands of the military, foreign leaders (many of whom are the Saddam Husseins or Osama bin Ladens of the world), or nations that remain corrupt as hell. All the while we refuse to fund the NCLB law, fail to create equitable taxation for school funding, and ignore the basic infrastructure of our school systems. We'll go into major debt to go to war in an unwarranted manner, spend millions on secret surveillance programs, but fight like hungry dogs to scrap anything that has to do with assuring a quality education system. Go figure.

The article below addresses some of the issues of using standardized testing as the sole determinants of assessing education without really implementing (or even being able to implement) genuine standards, equitable standards, or even consistent standards.

The School Testing Dodge

Many of the nations that have left the United States behind in math and science have ministries of education with clear mandates when it comes to educational quality control. The American system, by contrast, celebrates local autonomy for its schools. When Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act, it tried to address the quality control problem through annual tests, which the states were supposed to administer in exchange for federal dollars. But things have not quite worked out as planned.

A startling new study shows that many states have a longstanding tradition of setting basement-level educational standards and misleading the public about student performance. The patterns were set long before No Child Left Behind, and it will require more than just passing a law to change them.

Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), a research institute run jointly by Stanford and the University of California, showed that in many states students who performed brilliantly on state tests scored dismally on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is currently the strongest, most well-respected test in the country.

The study analyzed state-level testing practices from 1992 to 2005. It found that many states were dumbing down their tests or shifting the proficiency targets in math and reading, creating a fraudulent appearance of progress and making it impossible to tell how well students were actually performing.

Not all states have tried to evade the truth. The tests in Massachusetts, for example, yield performance results that are reasonably close to the federal standard. Not so for states like Oklahoma, where the score gap between state and federal tests has averaged 48 points in reading and 60 points in math, according to the PACE report. The states that want to mislead the government — and their own residents — use a variety of dodges, including setting passing scores low, using weak tests and switching tests from year to year to prevent unflattering comparisons over time. These strategies become transparent when the same students who perform so well on state tests do poorly on the more rigorous federal exam. Most alarming of all, the PACE study finds that the gap between student reading performance on the state and federal tests has actually grown wider over time — which suggests that claims of reading progress in many states are in fact phony.

States have always resisted the idea of one national set of tests, citing local autonomy. But if the United States wants to equal its competitors abroad, it must move away from a patchwork system based on weak standards and a frankly fraudulent system of student assessment. Under one promising proposal, the government would finance creation of a rigorous, high-quality test that would be provided free to the states — as long as they agreed to use federal scoring standards. That would finally give the country an accurate and all-encompassing view of student performance.

Then there is the issue of getting the subject matter correct. In Florida--a bastion of ultra-conservative bovine excrement among its Bible-thumping minority that consistently turns out the vote to appear as if it were the majority--the powers that be are trying to regulate the teaching of history by limiting it to "just the facts." As I read the issue being presented, they want history to be presented as a series of significant dates and events that are not explained in terms of the economic, social, political, religious and cultural context in which these events occurred. Can history be taught in this manner? Only if what we want is an entire generation of trivia wizards instead of an educated populous that understands how to critically examine the events of our time, our historical roots and our long-standing values.

But isn't that exactly what the ultra-conservatives want so they can claim a constructive history that purports ultra-conservative Christianity as the only basis for Americanism, American values and American political principles? Today being Sunday I watched Dr. James Kennedy from Florida speak exactly to this issue. He took the outrageous statements of a representative from a nut case fringe element and attributed it to all liberals and unbelievers, touting the evils of a poor education system not based on Christian values in the process. In so doing, he elevated himself, his church and his denomination to the status of a nut case fringe element that just doesn't understand history.

History Under Construction in Florida

AS a historian, I love facts. I especially love facts about early America, the subject I have researched, taught and written about for more than 40 years. The Florida Legislature would seem to share my enthusiasm. An education law it recently enacted insists, "American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed" and "shall be viewed as knowable, teachable and testable." The statute places particular importance on the facts of the Declaration of Independence, which was adopted by the Second Continental Congress two days after its vote for independence on July 2, 1776 — 230 years ago today.

Yet the wording of the law befuddles me. Facts mean little or nothing without being interpreted — another word for "constructed." All historians know that facts never speak for themselves.

Take an example from my own experience. Several years ago I was delighted to uncover proof in the British Public Record Office that an accused male "witch" in 1692 Salem, Mass., had been trading with enemy French and Indians, just as a young accuser had charged. That document confirmed my developing conviction that the Salem witch trials were linked to New England's hostile relationships with the French and Indians. But to many other scholars who previously had encountered that document, it meant no such thing.

The Florida law, while claiming to eschew constructed interpretations, is itself an obvious construction. The statute specifically defines what the term "American history" includes: "the period of discovery, early colonies, the War for Independence, the Civil War, the expansion of the United States to its present boundaries, the world wars, and the civil rights movement to the present."

Among the multitude of omissions from that list is any discussion of the religious development of the country or the transformation from an agricultural to an industrial economy. The statute thus constructs an American past that values certain aspects — especially wars and the civil rights movement — more than others.

Nowhere is this construction more obvious than in the law's emphasis on the Declaration of Independence as a key founding document. "The history of the United States," it asserts, "shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence." Elsewhere, it lists those principles: "national sovereignty, natural law, self-evident truth, equality of all persons, limited government, popular sovereignty and inalienable rights of life, liberty and property."

Reading that made me wonder if Florida's legislators had familiarized themselves with the Declaration and the context of its adoption. Thomas Jefferson's famous phrase, after all, was "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" — not property.

The Declaration ended, rather than created, a government. It forcefully asserted the right of the people to alter or abolish a polity unresponsive to their needs, a "universal principle" overlooked by Florida's legislators. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 — who drafted the document on which the nation is actually based — rarely mentioned the Declaration in debate. Indeed, as Pauline Maier, a historian, has pointed out, we owe the current interpretation of the Declaration to 19th-century commentators, especially Abraham Lincoln.

What, then, is to be made of the stress on the Declaration in the new Florida law? An earlier version of the law had emphasized study of the Constitution and the Declaration equally, describing each in general terms. In the new version, only the description of the Constitution retains its non-prescriptive character. The Constitution, after all, is an inconvenient vehicle for setting forth universal principles; it concerned itself with nitty-gritty details about federalism, separation of powers and the like. Further, the Constitution supported the continuation of slavery, thereby undermining the notion that the nation from its earliest days adhered to Florida's list of universal principles, prominently including "equality of all persons."

In short, a class learning about the drafting of the Constitution would confront the unpleasant reality of founding fathers who either owned slaves themselves or protected the right of others to own them. How much simpler and less troubling to present young people with a rosy picture based on modern understandings of the language of the Declaration of Independence! Under the guise of returning to a factual teaching of history in the state's schools, Florida's legislators have mandated an ahistorical construction that paradoxically distorts the very facts they purport to revere.

The Florida law highlights a growing tendency in the United States to substitute easily grasped absolutes for messy and ambiguous realities. (Another example of the same type of thinking is the quest of certain judges to capture the "original intent" of constitutional clauses.) A stress on facts, not constructions, superficially appears to be ideologically neutral. Yet the choice of which facts to stress, and which to omit, is crucial. In the end, history can never be "factual ...not constructed," as the language of the Florida statute itself demonstrates.