Beware of the Standards, Not Just the Tests
Learning is threatened by specific, measurable uniform mandates.
A number of prominent educators are finally raising their voices against standardized testing—particularly multiple-choice, norm-referenced tests; particularly tests with "high stakes" (read: bribes and threats) attached; and particularly in the context of a federal mandate to force every state to test every student in grades 3-8 every year. Yet even as more opinion leaders come to understand the damage attributable to testing mania, it is still rare to hear objections to the standards movement as a whole.
The Learning First Alliance, a coalition of leading education groups, cautiously raised concerns about the tests not long ago, but mostly out of fear that the burgeoning grassroots opposition might bring down the state standards, too. Education Week 's 2001 edition of Quality Counts likewise worried that tests "are overshadowing" and "do not adequately reflect" the standards. Major conferences carry titles such as "Standards: From Theory to Practice" and "Will Standards Survive the Classroom?" (You will look in vain for conferences called "Will Classrooms Survive the Standards?" or "Standards: From Capitulation to Resistance.")
A list of boat-rocking books on the subject begins and pretty much ends with Susan Ohanian's One Size Fits Few and Deborah Meier's Will Standards Save Public Education? Alarms have been quietly raised by Nel Noddings, Elliot Eisner, James Beane, and a few other eminent educators in the pages of Phi Delta Kappan . Otherwise, the field seems to have closed ranks around the idea that it is permissible to criticize the tests, but not the standards. Indeed, test opponents are sternly reminded to avoid confusing the two, as though they were in fact unrelated. I want to argue not only that they are inextricably connected—the tests serving, at least in theory, as the enforcement mechanism of the standards—but also that the latter may be every bit as...
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