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A Champion in the Fight Against Testing
Standards
by Jay Mathews, Washington Post, September 24, 2002
For more articles on disabilities and special ed visit
www.bridges4kids.org.
Those of us who support the movement to measure educational
standards with tests have had a distinct advantage in debates
over this issue. Our opponents often do not know much about
our principal source of concern--poor kids and their schools.
The leading critics of high-stakes tests often live in places
like Scarsdale, N.Y., some distance from inner city schools.
Although the anti-testers do not actually think of the issue
this way, it has been easy--an old debating trick--to portray
them as rich people trying to protect their little darlings
from a few annoying multiple choice tests when those same
tests are vital in keeping track of school progress--or lack
of progress--in low-income neighborhoods.
Well, no more cheap victories for us. The movement against
standardized testing has finally found a champion who cannot
be dismissed as a country club obstructionist. She is Deborah
Meier, a fierce opponent of standardized tests who is also
founder of the Central Park East School in East Harlem,
co-principal of the Mission Hill School in Boston, and one of
the most knowledgeable and innovative inner city educators the
country has ever seen.
The Better Late Than Never Book Club--my lonely effort to
promote worthy, if often obscure, writing on education--hereby
announces as its latest selection Meier's new book, "In
Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era
of Testing and Standardization" (Beacon: $23). The BLTN club
usually stumbles across a good book long after it has been
published, because the president and recording secretary is
such a slow reader. But I was looking for a book like this,
and Meier caught my attention (just five weeks after the pub
date) by putting a very important word, "trust," in the title.
It has been clear to me for some time that the fierce argument
over how to help our worst schools arises from a failure of
confidence in educators. Meier herself deserves some blame for
this. A generation ago, most Americans who worried about
schools accepted the notion that inner city and rural teachers
were doing their best, but could not be expected to do much
with low-income kids. The assumption was that until their
parents got better jobs and their families grew smaller and
less stressful, they would not be able to learn as quickly or
as well as their suburban counterparts.
But then we began to hear of educators who had made remarkable
headway with such children without waiting for a social
revolution. There were, among others, Marva Collins in
Chicago, Jaime Escalante in East Los Angeles, and Meier in New
York City. Meier reduced our trust of ordinary teachers by
raising our expectations. With a few other rebel teachers and
administrators, she created small, intimate learning
communities for Harlem kids and succeeded in preparing large
numbers of them for college. She joined with the Annenberg
Institute for School Reform to bring the idea to several other
New York schools, and helped start a revolution in small urban
schools that--with a big new dose of money from computer
magnate Bill Gates--is changing education in several cities.
Even at 71, Meier is dealing with kids every day at Mission
Hill Elementary, a pilot school in the heavily minority
Roxbury section of Boston. As she says in her book, the more
she sees of the effects of standardized testing on schools
like hers, the more she loathes the idea of politicians
setting school standards and enforcing them with tests.
Among her other talents, Meier is probably the best writer
among working educators today. She is always honest, even when
it weakens her case, and that is why I find her new book so
irresistible and so troubling for those of us who think
standards and standardized tests are the only practical way to
keep a messy, easily distracted democratic system concentrated
on helping poor kids learn.
She starts with the fairest and most accurate summary of the
standards movement ever written by a critic of standardized
testing: "It's built around the idea that the villain is
mostly low expectations and a failure of will power. Since
both are indisputably factors in failure and less onerous to
tackle than poverty, for example, this notion eliminates
victimology. And it keeps us focused. Ordinary citizens,
including parents and teachers, are aware of how often local
parent councils, teacher unions, principals, and local school
boards have abused their powers--here's a way to catch them.
No more excuses."
This movement, she says, is particularly appealing "to those
who have the most reason to distrust our schools: urban
minority families and those inclined to be suspicious of any
public institution."
"The idea of holding schools accountable to test scores has
its attractions, fits aspects of the national mood, and
adheres to a long-standing American tradition of turning to
standardized testing as the answer to our ills," she says.
"But the trouble is, as we keep relearning generation after
generation, it contradicts what we know about how human beings
learn and what tests can and cannot do. That a standardized
one-size-fits-all test could be invented and imposed by the
state, that teachers could unashamedly teach to such a test,
that all kids could theoretically succeed at this test, and
that it could be true to any form of serious intellectual
and/or technical psychometric standards is just plain
undoable. And the idea that such an instrument should define
our necessarily varied and at times conflicting definitions of
being well educated is, worse still, undesirable."
One of the advantages of reviewing books on my own is that I
am perfectly free (as I would not be if I were writing this
for a respectable book review page) to call up the author and
pick a fight. I tried this with Meier. She called me right
back from Boston to gleefully slap me around and help me see
the core of her argument.
Essentially, she has higher hopes for schools than I do. I
think we need standards and tests because they are, at worst,
a mild annoyance to the best teachers but essential to keeping
an eye on the worst teachers, and allowing administrators to
rush help to trouble spots. Meier thinks--and she has years of
experience with low-income students to prove her point--that
such kids can learn the way graduate students do, in small
seminars, debating key points with learned and enthusiastic
teachers and researching questions of their own choosing. They
can be assessed by independent panels who look at their
writings and sit with them for an hour or so asking questions
that need much more of an answer than filling in a small
rectangle on a computer score sheet with a number two pencil.
I think that is a wonderful goal, but that it will take a long
time to produce enough teachers able to teach that way. In the
meantime we risk losing another generation of poor kids if we
don't do the best job we can for them right now. Meier says I
am wrong, that we are going to lose them anyway because the
tests are badmeasures of what they have learned and because,
without a major change in the way we teach, the scores are
going to remain low no matter how many resources we pour into
our weakest schools.
Meier admits that she has lost many more battles than she has
won in her long effort to change the direction of American
education. She knows her way of helping those children who
most need help is difficult, and she cannot guarantee that it
will work everywhere.
But she has at least as much, if not more, to show for her
efforts as anyone else I know, and she has thankfully not lost
her sense of humor in the process. I asked how she could count
on a culture that worships baseball scores and stock tables
and annual reports to shed its yearning for regular
standardized test data from schools.
She said she understood the problem, but thought Americans
were capable of rising above our craving for strict numerical
assessment of all things. She said she understands that
weakness because she shares it.
"I like baseball scores," she said. "I like them so much that
that may explain why I have always been a New York Yankees
fan. I want to win at something."
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